2mo ago

You don't need the mouse

62 comments

Recently had to edit the hosts-file on a remote host, and I don't know if using two proxy jumps to SSH into it broke it, but it just wouldn't let me select text with the mouse.
I had to duplicate seven lines and edit the IP addresses, and without being able to copy-paste, I already saw myself manually typing it out.
Then I remembered that in Vim, you can do d5↓ to delete 5 lines. Surely that would also work with copying/yanking. And yep, a y7↓ and a paste later and I had duplicated the lines.
Then use the multi-line cursor like I routinely do for changing all 7 IP addresses...
...and now I feel like I've crossed the line where people will think I'm just a wizard.
- Ctrl-K and Ctrl-U in nano, a sane editor that does not hate you
  
  Ctrl-X Ctrl-V in micro, if you appreciate a sane editor with sane keybindings.
  
  Vim doesn't hate you. It loves who you could be.
  
  How do I do regex or connect to an LSP with nano?
  
  Doesn't that just cut one line at a time? Or is this Emacs-like, where it buffers the lines?
  That host doesn't have internet access, though, so installing a different editor wasn't really an option to begin with...
- Just switch to visual mode and select the text and yank it.
  Press v where you want to start the selection from (switches to visual mode), hjkl (or arrow keys) to move the cursor to the end, then you can yank it from there. It'll highlight what you're selecting just like you're using your mouse, but you're using the keyboard.
  If you want to get really fancy there are 3 different kinds of visual mode, but lower case is the most often one that I use because it's char by char, V is line by line, Ctrl+v is "block" (you can select chunks across several lines omitting things at the beginning or end of lines).
  Ctrl+V to do the block mode is nice if you need to edit the same part of several lines that all line up vertically, you just Ctrl+v, jk to select the lines, then I (shift+i) to insert on all those lines (if you're in vim you can delete things in insert mode also, if you're in vi you'll need to delete first then insert)
  
  Had not heard of block mode. I need to try this.
  
  Yeah, when I then used Visual Block mode to do the multi-line cursor, I realized I probably could've selected+yanked it that way, too.
  But that is some good info nonetheless. I wasn't actually aware of the different Visual modes...
  
  y6jjp is generally faster, tho, as long as you know you need exactly 7 lines or happen to have :set nu rnu in your config. Also, if using nvim, having yanks highlighted helps immensely
- I've been using vim as my primary text editor and IDE for near a decade. I forgot that this was a thing so, I've been using visual mode like a peasant.
- The real question is why you're torturing yourself by manually fixing that stuff? Don't you terraform your Ansibles?
  
  lol @drudgesentinel@fedi.seriousbusiness.international
  
  That is a very good question. It all started as a dainty test setup, and I guess, we had lost the routine of always scripting hardware setups, because our previous project hadn't required it.
  Obviously, the second-best time to start doing it is now, but I'd need to properly learn one of these first to be able to lead the way on that.
  Which collides with me not really wanting to use any of the ones I've experienced so far (Ansible, Puppet) in my freetime. 🫠

I always found it weird that tony said this because like he is also pretty much nothing without his suit?
- Steve Rogers: Big man in a suit of armour. Take that off, what are you?
  Tony Stark: Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist.
  Tony was being snarky, but he's not wrong about the suit being just an extension. Yes, it's important to his abilities, otherwise he wouldn't have needed it from the beginning in the cave. But it's also not a crutch, as Ironman 3 showed and taught him, and he's trying to show Peter that it begins with the person.
  Also keep in mind what he said to Peter in this same scene - when Peter said he just wanted to be like Tony, Tony comes back and says yeah, and I wanted you to be better. Tony knows that Peter truly doesn't need the suit because he is that powerful, it's just once again an extension that enhances those abilities, and if Peter thought it was the suit that made him special he wouldn't grow.
- Stark made the suit with no help. He doesn't need a specific suit because he has the skill to invent whatever he may need.
  At this point, Peter can't make himself a suit like that, so if he is nothing without it, he can't respect the power it brings. But he isn't nothing without it, which is what Stark is trying to teach him: not to rely on power of others.
- Take away the suit, and Stark is still the guy who made the suit.
- Not at all.
  He's a billionaire genius playboy philanthropist.
- The suit is merely a product of his true power
- Wasn't this the plot of Iron Man 3?

One of the things that really, really annoys me when I get lazy and use a pre-bundled set of (neo)vim plugins is how every one of them uses mouse functionality. I only use the mouse to copy/paste from the terminal to system clipboard. I don't want it hijacking him and entering visual mode.
- does this suggest that copy/paste from the terminal is broken by design and we need find a better way?
  
  I like your thinking. Give me Firefox with a TUI and POSIX shell i/o redirection support.
  
  Vim has a better way, it's called :set clipboard=unnamedplus (alternatively, one can bind anything else to copy/paste to/from system cliboards). Not sure why would one use a mouse for this, honestly
  
  Might I suggest a common set of keybinds... maybe C for copy, and v for vaste... maybe use ctrl as well?
- pee bundled neovim add-ons might as well use helix.
  
  You know, if I can use vim bindings and regex, I might try it out. I tend to try to keep my neovim plugins fairly lightweight when I config myself. Not being electron is a big plus.

Okay but... obligatory "gVim offers the best of both worlds by offering use of a mouse if you want it". There are also native ports for Mac OSX and Windows, etc.
Vim, in contrast, is a command-line program, suited for e.g. working with a text file on a remote server that may not even be running an X-windows interface, or maybe the user simply did not bother to connect to it:-).
Okay, we may now proceed with the humorous jesting:-).
- Or just :set mouse=a if your terminal emulator was updated in the past decade. gVim has nothing to offer anymore, except that it bundles its own weird terminal emulator that doesn't inherit any of the fonts, themes, settings or shortcuts of one's default terminal. Blegh.
  Also if you're not going to leverage Vim's main feature and just want to click around on stuff, just install VSCod(e|ium), which is genuinely amazingly good.
  
  Absolutely. Plus the keyboard shortcuts are just outstanding - e.g. shift-M takes you to the middle of the screen - and you can even programmatically do things like make changes to every other line within the range 100-1000 but nowhere else, and even then restrict the changes to only those matching a pattern.
  And it is installed on most every machine in the world - even Windows is putting bash onto things these days (I forget if that is still optional, admittedly I haven't touched Windows in nearly a decade:-P) - and has been since virtually the dawn of computing, certainly long before the modern age. :-D I've used ssh on a fucking blackberry and edited files with vim before smartphones existed!
  It is, however, notably hard to learn to use, I grant that:-).

ive been doing this for long enough to know you can use any text editor without a mouse.

Why are you using Vim for this? Vim actually allows you to change the cursor position and select text with the mouse if your terminal supports it.

Imagine using you mouser to click on all the things, like a pleb.
Mice are for fps.
/s
\ (well, only like 62% sarcasm tbh)

Shit, the touchpad is right there. They even cut a hole for it in the case. I think im gonna use it.

We’ll Skibidi Dibidi At’el Do.

62 comments