inamidst.com topic

Quick Reference

Some years ago, Aaron Swartz started a small and relatively unknown site called How to Do Stuff. The idea was that he'd produce a series of articles explaining clearly and straightforwardly how to do stuff on unix. The best article of the series was his one on CVS, which showed just how much of an art form making a tutorial can be.

Sadly, Aaron has yet to produce more than three articles in that series which can go straight into the "good idea for a series but too easily distracted to follow through" page on the Websites Tropes and Idioms Wiki (now there's a good idea for a series), which is something that I tend to do as well. So, in that vein, here are some How To articles that I've been working on and probably won't add to in future:

Hints and Tips

screen

• Commands
  • screen -dr := Attaches and removes any other connected clients
• Windows and Shells
  • C-a C-c := Create a new window and shell
  • C-a A := Title a particular window
  • C-a C-k := Close a window and shell
• Navigation
  • C-a " := Show a list of all windows
  • C-a [0-9] := Switch to window with that number
  • C-a ' := Switch to window name
• Scrolling
  • C-a Esc := Enter scrollback mode
• Quitting
  • C-a C-d := Detach from this screen session, leaving it running

vim

• z. = Recenter the screen around the current line
• O/o = Insert new line above/below
• ; = Repeat previous f search
• H/M/L = Move to top, middle, or last lines
• +/- = First non whitespace character of next or previous line
• ^F/^B = Forward or backward a screen
• n = Repeat last regexp search
• ddp = Move line down
• ddkP = Move line up
• . = Repeat last editing command
• dt/df = Delete up to, and delete up to and including
• c/something = Change up to and including "something"
• Esc O Esc o = Insert new paragraph here
• :%s/FROM/TO/gc = Substitute in whole file, prompting
• :*s/FROM/TO/g = Substitute in visual block

Footnote - How 2

There was also a programme on British television that was popular when I was growing up called How 2. Daniel Biddle reminded me of it recently when he talked about their experiment to see why toast tends to land butter side down (it's because it only has time to make one revolution before it hits the ground). It had Fred Dinenage presenting it. Oddly, he only gets 733 results on Google for his name. Anyway, it was a great show. This page was called "How To!" for a while, until I changed it to "Quick Reference".