Mac Terminal commands and packages / addons - Do you use any?

I am just getting started on Terminal and your tips and views are very much appreciated. Thank you.

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I’m an EMACS over VI person myself. But people interested particularly in historic terminal text editors might be amused by my (free) port of TECO (a 60+ year old text editor) at Tape Editor and COrector -- TECO!.

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Back in the 80s I used eMacs over VI all the time. More recently I started using VI and I have no idea what I was thinking. It gets stuff done but it is not intuitive. It is pretty customizable, though.

Has there ever been an Emacs-vs-vim flamewar here at MPU? :smiley: I’ve been an emacs user since… I guess it was 1996-ish so there’s a lot of muscle memory in me now, but I would prefer vim over any of the modern Electron based editors every time.

I’ve never seen a flamewar over it here. Personally I’m the same as you (lots of muscle memory), but with vi/vim. Lots of telnetting to servers in the early days of the Internet, and the more lightweight nature of vi made it a much better choice for sysadmin work. Never really got around to playing with Emacs. :slight_smile:

Heavy vi/vim user. I used to customize a lot for SysAdmin needs. Now on Mac I use iTerm2 and with OhMyZsh. It’s just awesome.

Wrote some websites by hand in vi (maybe vim – it was 1996 or so). Still use it a lot from the terminal, and I know I use a tiny fraction of its features; it’s just easier than firing up an app with a UI.

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I’m not an emacs user, but some of the emacs-style keybindings built into macOS are pretty handy. They even work on an iPhone if you’re using a bluetooth keyboard.

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I use the Emacs style navigation commands in both MacOS and iPadOS text fields all the time: ctl-a/b/d/e/f/h/i/j/k/l/n/p/t almost all work everywhere. Typing on Windows / Linux without them is an exercise in frustration. Obviously, you need Caps Lock set to control to complete the virtuous circle.

Unfortunately, some of the MacOS/Emacs shortcuts haven’t made it across to iPadOS yet. E.g. ctl-opt-b/f for back/forwards word don’t work on the iPad yet, and there’s not way of adding them (as there is on the Mac for adding extra bindings with DefaultKeybinding.dict).

Also, there’s no equivalent of Karabiner Elements, so I can’t double-use Caps Lock (as Control and Escape) and Return (Control and Return) as I do on the Mac. This means that when i type on the iPad I keep getting a new line followed by an a when I thought I was typing ctl-a, but still, it’s useful to have the basic Emacs shortcuts, even if it’s not perfect.

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We’ve been having a discussion on iPad vs. MacBook in another thread, and that brings up another advantage of macOS over iPadOS: you can customize the keyboard much more extensively, though I don’t personally do much of that because I like my keyboards to work similarly across devices.

Quite – though the iPad with Magic Keyboard, even without these extra features, is still so much more efficient for typing than Windows or Linux. (You can do some clever stuff with Linux and xcape / xmodmap which makes it bearable, but the lack of emacs bindings in text fields is still painful.)

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I’ve tried to get one going several times but we’re too civil a bunch here :grin:

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Something that took me a while to appreciate(I was thrown into Unix sysadminning without warning or consultation back in the early-mid 90s and just kept on doing it) is that the opposite is also true, especially for automation.

For doing things with computers/computer-like-things, a GUI is often far superior to the command line, but for doing things to them, it’s hard to beat a good command line environment.

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I’ve used MacVim over the years, but I’m wondering if anyone has a recommendation for a NeoVim front-end – e.g. FVim, Goneovim, or NeoVim-qt?

I don’t use vim, but fwiw the Vim People Doing Vim Things thread under Off Topic on the Obsidian Discord is pretty active and includes Mac users, so you might find it worthwhile to drop in and ask your question even if you don’t use Obsidian.

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