Miguel de Icaza: Learning Unix

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Sep-06.html

by alexkay • 15 years ago

217 123 15 years ago

LeafStorm• 15 years ago

I need to remember this one: "And you will offer to buy me a beer, which I will refuse because I rather have you buy me a freshly squeezed orange juice."

mahmud• 15 years ago

Screw-driver then.

bitops2• 15 years ago

That could be considered the "Beer Ware" license for San Francisco in the 21st century. And it should be certified organic/vegan/etc.

middus• 15 years ago

I created a "license" and put in on GitHub: https://github.com/felixmiddendorf/ojware-license/blob/maste... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2984233

dmboyd• 15 years ago

Mavis beacon teaches typing.. Seriously?

andrewhare• 15 years ago

He sounded pretty serious to me. Do you have a better suggestion? The Mavis Beacon software does a perfectly fine job at teaching touch-typing.

SkyMarshal• 15 years ago

Ktouch is awesome, Free, and in the Deb repo's, maybe others. Simple, effective, nice UI, and you can learn any layout from Qwerty to Colemak.

ginkgo• 15 years ago

When I forced myself to learn touch-typing with a qwerty keyboard i used gtypist. I found it to be sufficient for its purpose.

The only gripe i had with it was that it required typing two spaces after a period. I found this just plain weird, so I fixed it in the tutorial files.

I guess using a blank keyboard also helped quite a bit..

okal2• 15 years ago

GNU gtypist. Got me from "hunt and peck" to touch typing with a decent wpm count within 2 weeks. Considering I used fewer than half of the tutorials, I think that's pretty awesome. It's an old GNU utility so it should be in any repos. Even had it on Cygwin.

sherr• 15 years ago

Klavaro Touch Typing Tutor is pretty good - Linux and OSX.

http://klavaro.sourceforge.net/en/

jeza• 15 years ago

I used some random type tutor software in high school (sometime in the mid-late 90s), though only spent enough time with it to learn the home keys. I would then look at the keyboard for the remainder of the keys. Initially that was probably no faster than my old hunt and peck method. I remember remarking at one stage that I was looking at the keyboard out of habit. Then one day I noticed that I was no longer looking at all. I'm sure it was a strange feeling at the time!

Goes to show you don't really need to learn the whole process with some type tutor software. Though in terms of efficiency you may want to be aware of what they suggest. For instance, I think I was hitting the Y key with my left hand rather than right hand at some stage, but long ago changed that.

mvalle2• 15 years ago

In an article called "Learning Unix", I think recommending (I assume proprietary) Windows/Mac software, is a bit silly.

thristian• 15 years ago

Well, I guess there's no memetically famous touch-typing tutorials software for Linux or Mac.

In fact, the only other memetically famous touch-typing software I know of is Typing Of The Dead¹, and that's not exactly widely-available.

¹: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Typing_of_the_Dead

officemonkey3• 15 years ago

In the 80s, I learned how to touch type by playing Infocom games like Zork.

The key to learning how to touch type is just typing _a lot_. You might not be very fast (I'm not), but you can at least get your eyes off your keyboard and use more than one finger per hand.

initself• 15 years ago

I did MBTT version 1.0 either on Dos or Win 3.1 (can't remember) when I was like 9 years old and I am currently the fastest typist I know.

foob• 15 years ago

I would like to add the Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide (http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/) as an incredible resource. It's obviously geared towards scripting but most of what it teaches is extremely useful for working in an interactive shell as well. I had been using linux and bash for years before I read it and I still picked up quite a bit when I finally got around to working through it.

gecko• 15 years ago

The only thing I don't quite grok is that, as the complexity of a given bash script increases, it moves ever-closer to looking exactly like the well-written-by-90s-standards Perl I remember from when I was just learning Unix.

Given that Perl's about as ubiquitous as bash (and arguably more so, since I literally don't know any mainstream *nix that ships without Perl in the core, and I know several that ship without bash), why not just use Perl in the first place? This is exactly what it was designed to do well, back in the beginning.

Scaevolus• 15 years ago

Learning the different things you can do with bash scripts, especially the string operations, made me a lot faster at doing batch tasks from the command-line.

For longer-term scripts over a few lines, it's easier to use a powerful language you're comfortable with (maybe one of Perl, Python, Ruby) than to waste time (re)learning shell scripting whenever you need to extend the script.

alexkay• 15 years ago

> since I literally don't know any mainstream -nix that ships without Perl in the core, and I know several that ship without bash

FreeBSD doesn't have Perl in the base system (but of course has it in the ports). Same with Bash though, but the Bourne shell is of course in the base.

Adaptive• 15 years ago

Agreed. The string operations alone are, while not sed level awesome, pretty amazing. Also, indirection, in bash, is pretty useful. ${prefix_*} is nice to have around.

dramaticus34• 15 years ago

"Nobody really knows what the Bourne shell's grammar is. Even examination of the source code is little help."

— Tom Duff

sciurus2• 15 years ago

For anyone interested in an overview of the Bourne-Again Shell's source code, look at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2969751

sciurus2• 15 years ago

He's right when he says Unix Power tools "is the atomic bomb of Unix knowledge".

shaggyfrog• 15 years ago

I still have my copy of UNIX for the Impatient I bought in 1997 and I still find myself referring to it occasionally (less so these days, with Internet references being more accessible generally). Quite a thing for that book to stand the test of time so well to still find it recommended -- 1995 edition and all. The C equivalent would probably be Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment.

tingletech• 15 years ago

in a computer lab between pepper canyon and warren college at UCSD in 1991 it was written to type 'man man' and maybe even 'apropos' was written up there on a chalk board. I taught myself unix from the manual. A few years later, I learned perl starting with 'perldoc perldoc'.

flatwhatson• 15 years ago

In all my years of using and loving (and abusing) the shell, I've never encountered apropos. I'm really amazed that something so fundamental has somehow been left out of the many unix/shell articles (such as this one) that I've read. Anyhow, you've made my day. Thanks!

juiceandjuice• 15 years ago

Are most people not touch typers? I've noticed my boss isn't really a touch typer, despite programming since before I was born, but I always assumed the majority of CS people were.

bitops2• 15 years ago

You'd be surprised how many senior-level people are hunt and peck typers. I've met several software engineers with 10+ years of experience who don't type with all 10 fingers (assuming they have that many).

zura• 15 years ago

Yes. Actually, I don't understand why people emphasize on touch typing here. Engineering is not a data entry job.

hendi_• 15 years ago

I'm a touch typer, but not in the standard sense. I don't look up the keys while writing and use most of my ten fingers, but I don't use them like it's taught in touch typing. I know exactly where all the keys are and I intuitively press them with some fingers depending on which is nearest or easiest at the specific moment. According to [1] I can easily type faster than 600 keys per minute, more than all other people I know.

I don't think I should learn touch typing to further increase my typing speed. Right now most of the time my pondering over coding problems is limiting my typing speed, not my ability to move my fingers.

But maybe it's worth learning touch typing to reduce the stress on the fingers and be more egonomic?

[1] http://speedtest.10-fast-fingers.com/

wtracy• 15 years ago

Actually, from an ergonomics perspective, you would probably be worse off touch typing.

Traditional touch typing trains you to hold your hands in a consistent position over the keyboard. It's the act of holding your hand in the same position all day--whether that's over a keyboard or around a mouse--that leads to carpal tunnel syndrome.

(For the record: I touch type mostly the way I was taught to. My wrists do occasionally bother me. I'm 24. YMMV.)

kmm• 15 years ago

I can touch type in the sense that I don't look at my keyboard when I type, yet I don't really use ten fingers. I was never properly taught to type.

Coincidentally, I'm trying to learn real touch typing as I think it could help me in Vim.

robryan• 15 years ago

I don't think that you really have to be, I think it helps less than in regular writing.

Personally my style is very anti touch, using 2 fingers for the majority of letters, which I don't have to look at the keyboard for but I probably take more glances at it that a touch typist. I think though in being proficient in navigating the symbols on the keyboard mostly makes up for the loss in outright English typing speed.

super_mario4• 15 years ago

I'm always shocked to see a developer not touch type. I just can't understand those 10% or so, that spend their life essentially editing text and yet can't touch type. It's one of those essential skills that you learn once and reap the benefits for the rest of your life.

loup-vaillant2• 15 years ago

This is vastly, vastly more than 10%. Where I work at, hunt & peck is the norm. Now, many hunt & peck typists I see at work type relatively fast, without looking at the keyboard too much.

mekoka• 15 years ago

Where do you get 10% from? Most programmers are fast on a keyboard, but being fast != touch-typing. Admittedly, not all touch-typists train their fingers to properly remember the numbers row or the set of accompanying punctuations and symbols, they might sometimes need to look at the keyboard to find stuff like tilde, pipe or the underscore.

However, if you catch yourself needing to even just glance at the keyboard while typing basic stuff, you're not a touch-typist, no matter how fast you are.

Many people feel that being fast is good enough. It has been my observation though, that the lag between typos and their fix is considerably shorter (almost instantaneous) for touch-typists (they're looking at the screen as it's happening). Indeed, I'm always a tiny bit annoyed when while sitting next to someone editing code, they accidentally turn on caps and it takes forever for them to realize it (like 10 characters later).

sb• 15 years ago

Hm, instead of MC I prefer dired+ within Emacs, I have never used anything more powerful than this (particularly with TRAMP and the regex features.) So, if you are already learning Emacs, I think it pays off to at least take a look at dired(+).

(Minor remark: for smaller tasks [and instead of launching a terminal window] I prefer to use the DirOpus clone "worker" on UNIX.)

pointyhat7• 15 years ago

Without starting a religious war, it's essential to learn the basics of vi for it is ubiquitous on all UNIX variants. Even if you use emacs, it's essential knowledge.

jrockway3• 15 years ago

Why? vi isn't even the default editor on many Linux distributions anymore.

pointyhat7• 15 years ago

It is on Debian and CentOS server installs and is available on a Ubuntu default install. It's the common denominator.

Why frig around with emacs, pico, nano etc when vi is always there and is the same?

darklajid• 15 years ago

I'm serious, not trying to be an ass here:

Is emacs?

It seems to me that both religions are not 'standard' anymore. I tend to see pico, nano, joe etc. - occasionally vi (but not vim).

davidw2• 15 years ago

While this argument might have held weight once, I think these factors undermine it:

Emacs used to be considered 'expensive' in terms of disk/memory. These days, it really isn't.

Non-Linux unixes are less and less of a factor these days, and even most of those have some sort of packaging system where installing emacs is a quick operation, rather than a laborious download/compile/install.

Emacs itself has remote editing capabilities with Tramp, via ssh that obviates the need to fire up an editor on the target machine in some cases.

If your job involves sitting down at HPUX/Irix/AIX/whatever machines that haven't been updated since 1998, and don't allow remote access, yes, vi is probably a valuable skill. Otherwise, I think this argument is less important than it once was.

pointyhat7• 15 years ago

If you use a default server install of debian, ubuntu or centos, it doesn't have emacs installed. The installation media and recovery CDs don't either.

That is enough justification, especially when you're at a single user mode console on a ILO card when the machine won't boot and flames are coming out of everything. Vi is there for you and emacs SSH won't be saving you when the network is not up so you cant apt-get or yum emacs. It's also not the sort of time you want to start having to learn vi.

I know this because I've been there.

It's as important as it always was, much as pen and paper are.

exDM69• 15 years ago

When you're not working on a full linux distro, e.g. hacking a wifi router box or a network assisted storage box, you might not have the luxury of emacs available.

However, it's more likely that you will have some version of Vi. The one I'm thinking of is the Busybox version.

Goladus• 15 years ago

It's still valid. I haven't had to use vi in awhile but there are still a lot of OSes that don't have emacs installed by default. And every so often you'll wind up on a system where EDITOR isn't set and you'll get stuck in vi by accident.

The thing is, though, the subset of vi you have to learn to is relatively small. You need to know how to enter and leave insert mode, how to delete, and how to quit with and without saving. (For a non-vi user, the difference between knowing and not knowing those simple things is significant)

This is generally enough to edit the few configuration files you may need to touch before you install emacs (network, sources.list, sudoers, etc).

So even though the use case is small and shrinking, the amount of "vi skill" you need is pretty low as well. There's really no good excuse to avoid it.

dramaticus34• 15 years ago

cough ed cough

though you wont find either on your fresh gentoo install

pointyhat7• 15 years ago

No because it'd take 9 years to compile it all ;-)

josteink2• 15 years ago

Why? vi and its derivates has their own (weird) usage-convention which you will find in no other software anywhere on the planet. Learning them gives you very few transferable skills.

Any "Unixy" thing you have around these days will have more resources than most computes did in the mid 90s, and the need for a "lightweight" editor like vi is much, much smaller now than it was back then. Even my Buffalo router has nano.

For most Linux distros you install, you typically have nano, pico, joe, jedit or emacs or lots of other editors which (apart from emacs which is its own universe) largely follows the same conventions and at large gives transferable skills. These are IMO much more useful to know.

Why should I bother learning an archaic, non-standard editor from an era when "line-editors" were considered bloated? Why should it even be considered "relevant" today? Even more so, why should it be considered "essential"?

I really don't agree and I really don't see why vi-users insist everyone need to learn their favourite editor.

sixtofour4• 15 years ago

"Why? vi and its derivates has their own (weird) usage-convention which you will find in no other software anywhere on the planet. Learning them gives you very few transferable skills."

Arrgghhh!

man readline, and search (/) for inputrc.

ANY app that uses readline can be set to use vi OR emacs keystrokes and history, by setting an entry in .inputrc. If you use either editor regularly this will set your command line skills in lots of software all over the planet to warp speed.

If you write python command line programs, try "import readline."

Harumph!

nollidge• 15 years ago

I think the main reason is when you're stuck on an unfamiliar system and emacs/[your favorite editor] is not available, vi is always there.

sixtofour4• 15 years ago

Reply to above, and siblings.

FTA: "If you learn to use Emacs, you will automatically learn the hotkeys and keybindings in hundreds of applications in Unix."

His point here is not to learn Emacs because it's a good editor, but because the keystrokes transfer to "hundreds of applications in Unix."

Which is true enough. In the (bash etc) shell you can change that to vi keystrokes with set -o vi, and you can change the behavior of those hundreds of applications (like mysql, e.g) by having a .inputrc file, but by default, lots of those apps use emacs keystrokes.

Use whatever editor you want, for whatever reason you want. His suggestion is worth considering, for the reason he states.

rbanffy5• 15 years ago

> His point here is not to learn Emacs because it's a good editor,

Without starting a flamewar, I'd like to point out Emacs is a good editor.

archivator• 15 years ago

I'd especially like to point out that vi is the de facto editor in embedded Linux installs, since it comes with busybox. Unless you want to constantly shuffle files around between your machine and the embedded one, you just have to learn vi.

chalst2• 15 years ago

ed/ex is well worth learning. The other vi commands are less so, unless you prefer to use vim as your main editor.

If you are a vim power user, finding yourself using traditional BSD vi is likely to be an unpleasant experience, making the vim is great because vi is installed everywhere weak as an argument.

davidw2• 15 years ago

(From http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.msg.html )

“Ed is the standard text editor.”

Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty ed:

    golem$ ed

    ?
    help
    ?
    ?
    ?
    quit
    ?
    exit
    ?
    bye
    ?
    hello?
    ?
    eat flaming death
    ?
    ^C
    ?
    ^C
    ?
    ^D
    ?

---

Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity.

super_mario4• 15 years ago

Not really. VIM has vi as subset, and plain vanilla vi is still quite powerful text editor. It doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles, and I would not choose to use it as the primary editor for all tasks, but if I'm on a system where I have to edit something using plain vi, I won't have a hard time doing it and doing it fast.

ryanklee• 15 years ago

> Without starting a religious war

Famous last words ;-)

pointyhat7• 15 years ago

Indeed. It's almost as if Godwin is beckoning to be invoked.

seewhat• 15 years ago

Anecdote here...

While I find myself using Emacs more that Vi/Vim these days, I still find Vi key-bindings useful in the less(1) pager, which I use extensively.

I've just discovered that less responds to Emacs movements, but for searching text I rely on the vi slash. Secondly, when navigating multiple files in less, the vi/vim "next/prev file/buffer" commands (n/p) apply.

larsberg2• 15 years ago

Indeed. As part of my PhD duties, I've been the lab tutor for the first serious UNIX/systems programming course for the last three years, and I always teach vi:

ESC : q!

Because you never know when some commandline tool is going to drop you into vi (I teach them about the EDITOR variable, but sometimes you ssh somewhere and, you know...), and you need to know how to get out.

True story: the number one cause of issues with source code control systems is a vi session that the students accidentaly opened, managed to flee from with C-z, and didn't realize was still around with an open file holding the subversion lock and preventing them from committing their source code. I'd say I got 5-10 a quarter (~60 students in each quarter's session).

tehjones• 15 years ago

Its worse getting dropped into $USER_FRIENDLY_EDITOR_OF_THE_MOMENT. It's cool that the sys admin or the distro developer loves to use pico, nano, joe whatever, but I just want to make my change and move on.

pnathan2• 15 years ago

I suggest using hg or git, neither of which have a lock.

gcb3• 15 years ago

learn unix ... use midnight commander.

lolwat?

jrockway3• 15 years ago

Keep in mind that the same person wrote both this blog post and Midnight Commander.

gcb3• 15 years ago

and that validates midnight commander as a tool with the unix philosophy how?

downvote all you want. but a clone of norton commander was and always will be a joke.

...saw several sysadmins using it to delete files named with dash because they didn't know "--" is posix for stop taking flags. and that's just one bad vice it foments.

rbanffy5• 15 years ago

Which is rather interesting because, in an interview a couple weeks back, he said he wrote mc because he thought manipulating files through the shell was painful (or something to that effect) and he wanted something like Norton Commander for it.

http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail5021.html

bostonvaulter2• 15 years ago

Does anyone know any good online typing tutors? Especially for people who are already reasonably proficient (~60 wpm)

shawndumas2• 15 years ago

not on-line but... http://www.gnu.org/s/gtypist/

dramaticus34• 15 years ago

Miguel, please learn Unix

gradstudent• 15 years ago

Does anyone else find it deliciously ironic that, in such a pro-Unix article, Miguel recommends Mavis Beacon? According to Amazon, it's available only for Windows and OSX :p

skb_2• 15 years ago

I'm surprised he didn't recommend gtype, it's probably the best and fastest way to learn how to type in that there are no unnecessary graphics and you need not ever touch a mouse. Fits the Unix approach much better imo.

rbanffy5• 15 years ago

apt-get install gtype didn't work ;-) Googling for it led to a couple false hints, dead-ends and lots of information about viruses (not the computer kind)

spiffytech• 15 years ago

I had to spend several years in Middle School with Mavis Beacon and it didn't do anything for my typing abilities. When I was done with my computer classes I still couldn't hit 35 WPM.

Then I picked up computers as a hobby. With all the random typing I did as part of the hobby I quickly found myself in the 70-100 WPM range.

You don't really need a typing tutor program with its learning modules and fluff. You just need to spend time typing. I recommend printing out a color-coded image[1] of a keyboard that shows which fingers to use for which keys and just spending a little time on http://typeracer.com every day trying to stay on home row and follow the color guide.

[1] http://www.tranexp.com/win/05_Finger-placement.jpg

kasperset• 15 years ago

Another good book with historical perspective. Harley Hahn's Guide to Unix and Linux

RyanMcGreal• 15 years ago

I loved this:

> Save yourself the embarrassment, and avoid posting on the comments section jwz's quote on regular expressions. You are not jwz.

dools• 15 years ago

I personally though this was quite hilarious:

"But unless you touch-type, you are neither awesome, nor you are in a position to judge the qualities of the world as an oyster or any James Cameron movies."

Thoroughly enjoyable read I must say.

Miguel de Icaza: Learning Unix

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