Vim Tip: Global Delete

Josh VanderLinden

Comments

Today I was asked to help debug a problem with our product's patcher. All of the debug information for the entire product goes into a single log file, and some processes are quite chatty. The log file that contained the information I was interested in for the patcher problems was some 26.5MB by the time I got it.

All of the lines I was interested in were very easy to find, because they contained specific strings (yay). The problem was that they were scattered throughout the log, in between debug output for other processes. At first, I tried to just delete lines that were meaningless for me, but that got old very quickly. This is how I made my life easier using Vim.

It's possible to do a "global delete" on lines that don't contain the stuff you are interested in. The lines I wanted to see contained one of two words, but I'll just use foo and bar for this example:

:g!/\v(foo|bar)/d

This command will look for any line that does not contain foo or bar and delete it. Here's the breakdown:

  • :g - This is the command for doing some other command on any line that matches a pattern
  • ! - Negate the match (perform the pending command on any line that does not contain the pattern)
  • /\v(foo|bar)/ - The regular expression pattern
    • \v - Use of \v means that in the pattern after it all ASCII characters except '0'-'9', 'a'-'z', 'A'-'Z' and '_' have a special meaning (very magic). Basically, it removes the need to escape almost everything in your regex.
    • (foo|bar) - Find either foo or (|) bar
  • d - The command to perform on matching lines, which is delete in this case

So, executing that command in the Vim window with the log file wiped out all of the lines that didn't have my magical keywords in them.

When I showed my co-worker how awesome Vim was, he was mildly impressed, and then he asked, "What about multiline log messages?" My particular case didn't have any multiline messages, but I wanted to figure it out anyway. I haven't been able to figure out an exact method for deleting the lines that don't match, but I have found a way to show only the lines that match:

:g!/\v^".+(foo|bar)\_.{-}^"/p

This command is pretty close to the previous one.

  • :g - Global command on lines that match a pattern
  • ! - Negate the match (seems a little backward this time)
  • /\v^".+(foo|bar)\_.{-}^"/ - The regular expression pattern
    • \v - Very magic
    • ^" - Find a line that starts with a double quote ("). Each of our individual log messages starts with a double quote that is guaranteed to be at the beginning of the line, so this is specific to our environment.
    • .+ - One or more characters between the " and foo or bar
    • (foo|bar) - Find either foo or (|) bar
    • \_.{-}^" - Non-greedy multiline match. Matches any character, including newlines (because of the \_), and continues matching until it reaches the next line that begins with ^". Again, that double quote is specific to our environment. The {-} is what makes this a "non-greedy" match--it's like using *, but it matches matches as few as possible of the preceding atom.
  • p - The command to perform on matching lines, which is print in this case. This brings up a separate little window that displays each match (which is why I mentioned the negation seemed a bit backward to me). Navigation and whatnot in this window appears to be similar to less on the command line.

And there you have it! I hope you find this information as useful as it has been for me!

Whoa! Another Reason To Love Vim

Josh VanderLinden

Comments

I've been struggling with some misconfigured appliances at work for the past couple of days, and I was getting tired of manually diff-ing things. On a whim, I decided to ask Google if there is a better way. Turns out there is, and it uses what I already know and love: VIM. Here's a command that lets you diff two remote file using vimdiff:

vimdiff scp://user@host//path/to/file scp://user@otherhost//path/to/file

This is going to save me so much time! I hope it is as useful to you all as it is to me.

Review: Hacking Vim

Josh VanderLinden

Comments

Introduction

Some of my faithful visitors may have noticed that I have a thing for Vim, one of the oldest and most powerful text editors in the world. In the past 15 or so years that I've been developing, I have spent quite a bit of time in several different text editors. It seemed like I was continually on the quest to find the fastest, most feature-packed editor out there, while still being cross-platform compatible and having it stay out of my way. Speed has always been very important to me.

I have been using Vi and Vim regularly since about 2000, when I began dabbling with Linux. I could certainly hold my ground in either of the two programs, but I was by no means proficient. The more appealing text editors for me offered syntax highlighting and code completion. At the time, I was under the impression that Vi/Vim didn't offer either of these two features. It wasn't until around the middle of last year, however, that I really started putting effort into learning and using Vim. After asking some of my Vim-savvy friends a lot of questions to get me kickstarted, I began to see the power that lies in Vim.

Before long, Vim had replaced all other text editors as my preferred editing environment. I learned that Vim could satisfy just able every single one of my personal qualifications for the perfect editor. I dumped all other editors in favor of Vim, and I even opted to use Vim over a several hundred dollar IDE at work.

Anyway. I received a review copy of Kim Schulz' "Hacking Vim: A cookbook to get the most out of the latest Vim editor" a couple of months ago and have been rummaging through it since then. I have learned a ton of fantastic tips from this little book! Being a cookbook, you're not expected to read the entire book start to finish. Rather, you can dig right into whatever section interests you and feel right at home.

Brief Overview

Packt Publishing printed this book back in 2007, but all of the tips are still very much up-to-date. The book starts off with the obligatory history lesson (which is actually quite interesting if you're a nerd like me), and the target audience is described as such:

New users join the Vim user community every day and want to use this editor in their daily work, and even though Vim sometimes can be complex to use, they still favor it above other editors. This is a book for these Vim users.

After the history lesson, chapter 2 of the book digs right into personalizing Vim to fit your own preferences. Topics covered include:

  • changing fonts
  • changing color schemes
  • personalizing highlighting
  • customizing the status line
  • toggling menus and toolbars in gvim
  • adding your own menu items and toolbar buttons
  • customizing your work area

Chapter 3 discusses better navigation techniques. Topics covered include:

  • faster navigation in a file
  • faster navigation in the Vim help system
  • faster navigation in multiple buffers
  • in-file searching
  • searching in multiple files or buffers
  • using marks and signs

Chapter 4, titled "Production Boosters" discusses the following:

  • templates using simple template file
  • templates using abbreviations
  • auto-completion using known words and tag lists
  • auto-completion using omni-completion
  • macros
  • sessions
  • registers and undo branches
  • folding
  • vimdiff
  • opening remote files using Netrw

Chapter 5 introduces some advanced formatting tips. You can learn how to put text into nicely-formatted paragraphs, aligning text, marking headlines, and creating lists. For code, this chapter discusses several different indentation options.

Vim scripting is the topic of chapter 6, and Schulz covers a wide variety of useful tips to get anyone started on scripting Vim to do their bidding. Tips include:

  • creating syntax-coloring scripts
  • how to install and use scripts
  • different types of scripts
  • basic syntax of Vim scripts
  • how to structure Vim scripts
  • debugging a Vim script
  • using other scripting languages (Perl, Python, Ruby)

Appendix A describes how Vim can be used for much more than just text editing. Several different games, including Tetris and a Rubik's Cube are briefly introduced, along with how to use Vim as a mail client or programmer's IDE. Appendix B suggests miscellaneous configuration script maintenance tips, such as how you can maintain the same configuration script across several different machines.

My Thoughts

I was very impressed with this book. I was afraid that, being published in 2007, it might be a little too out-of-date for my personal tastes. Since the book is about Vim, though, I wasn't overly concerned (the editor has been around for decades, and it doesn't change drastically from release to release anymore).

Just like the last book I reviewed, I found several typos in this book. A lot of the typos were in the first few pages of the actual content, and some were definitely more minor than others. This sort of thing doesn't really detract much from the material covered, but it sure does stand out as a distraction for people who pay attention to details.

Here are some of the things that I truly enjoyed reading and learning about (many of which actually made my jaw drop in awe of Vim)

  • Specifying multiple fonts for GVim, just in case your first choice isn't always available:

    :set guifont=Courier\ New\ 12, Arial\ 10

  • Specifying different font faces based on the extension of the file you're editing:

    :autocmd BufEnter *.txt set guifont=Arial\ 12

  • Highlighting the line your cursor is currently on, and the column the cursor is in:

    :set cursorline
:set cursorcolumn

  • Limiting the number of suggestions that the spell checker offers:

    :set spellsuggest=5

  • Navigating to different words based on whitespace instead of "regular" word separators:

    • W to move to the beginning of the next word
    • B to move to the beginning of the previous word
    • E to move to the beginning of the previous word

    I knew about the lowercase variations of these commands, but not the uppercase.

  • Navigating up and down in the same long, wrapped line:

    gk
gj

  • Opening a file that is referenced in the current buffer:

    gf

    I learned that this even works on Python imports! Just like the description says, it will work on the import module, not classes or other objects from inside the module. Not quite that intelligent!

  • Incremental searching:

    :set incsearch

  • Searching up/down in a buffer for any occurrence of the word under the cursor:

    g#
g*

    I knew about the usual # and *, but those two will only match the same exact word. When they're prefixed with g, they will match any occurrence of the word, be it whole or part of another word. For example, hitting g* while the cursor is over the word foo would would match both food and foobar, while * would match neither.

  • Using markers to jump between specific points in different open buffers (mA through mZ)

  • Prepopulating empty files based on their extension:

    :autocmd BufNewFile * silent! 0r $VIMHOME/templates/%:e.tpl

  • Formatting a paragraph of text:

    gqap

  • Formatting all paragraphs of text in a file:

    1gqG

  • Smart indentation:

    :set smartindent

  • Enabling paste mode, so smartindent doesn't try to format code that you paste into your buffer:

    :set paste

  • Prettifying XML and HTML using Tidy:

    :autocmd FileType xml exe ":silent 1,$!tidy --input-xml true --indent yes -q"
:autocmd FileType html,htm exe ":silent 1,$!tidy --indent yes -q"

Conclusion

All in all, this is a fantastic book. I will be keeping it near my workstation as a quick reference book when I want to do something crazy with Vim. I've already recommended the book to several of my friends and acquaintances, and I will make the same recommendation here. If you are mildly familiar with Vim and at all interested in getting more out of this fabulous editor, I highly recommend picking up a copy of this book.

Another Bash Tip

Josh VanderLinden

Comments

I just learned yet another goodie about the Bash shell that I must share with you. This trick made my day on so many levels.

You know how annoying it is when you get those ridiculously long commands in a terminal window? You know how much more annoying it is when you generally can't Ctrl+arrow around the command to change bits and pieces when you're on OSX? If you've ever been in that boat, this tip is for you.

Bash allows you to hit Ctrl+x Ctrl+e to edit your current command in your "preferred" editor. Your "preferred" editor is determined from the EDITOR environment variable. Since I'm a fan of VIM, all I need to do is make sure I've got export EDITOR=vim in my .bashrc or something along those lines. Once I do that, I can hit Ctrl+x Ctrl+e anytime I am using Bash and have a smelly, long command I want to manipulate.

See it in action.

Even More New VIM Fun

Josh VanderLinden

Comments

It appears that my last article generated a bit of interest! I had one good friend share some enlightening tips with me after he read about my findings. He opened my eyes to the world of abbreviations in VIM. Oh boy, oh boy!!

I'll pretty much just continue today's earlier post, by showing another (super awesome) way to insert blocks into your Django templates. If you were to enter this line into your ~/.vimrc file...

ab bl <Esc>bi{% block <Esc>ea %}{% endblock %}<Esc>h%i

...you would be able to type this...

content bl

...while you're in insert mode. As soon as you hit your spacebar after the bl, VIM would turn it into...

{% block content %} {% endblock %}

...and put you in insert mode between the two tags. Perfect!

For those of you who are interested in understanding the abbreviation, first it will take you out of insert mode (<Esc>). Then it jumps to the beginning of the word before the bl abbreviation and drops back into insert mode (bi). Next it inserts {% block and hops out of insert mode long enough to move the cursor to the end of the word you typed before the bl abbreviation. It finishes inserting {% endblock %}, gets out of insert mode, goes back a character (to account for the space you typed after bl) (h), moves the cursor to the matching opening brace for the } at the end of {% endblock %} (%), and finally puts you back into insert mode (i). Whew! It's all the same old VIM stuff, just packed into one uber-powerful abbreviation!

Thank to Jonathan Geddes for the guidance on this! I find this method to be superior to the one I posted about earlier because you don't even have to leave insert mode to get the code block stuff inserted into your templates!

New Fun with VIM

Josh VanderLinden

Comments

Hey everyone! I apologize for my lack of writing lately. Our baby boy was born on August 8th, and I'm still trying to catch up to everything from April :)

However, today I figured out some neat magic with VIM that I just have to share. Part of it is also so I don't forget it in the future! That's how awesome it is.

As you well know, I'm a big fan of Django. And I'm a relatively recent convert to VIM. One thing that I find to be kind of a common thing for me when developing a Django site is adding new blocks in the templates. Typing the "boilerplate" code for these blocks is easy, but it takes time.

Today, while tinkering with VIM, I figured out a way to automate the insertion of the boilerplate code:

nnoremap <Leader>b i{% block  %}{% endblock %}<Esc>16hi

Inserting that in your ~/.vimrc will allow you to type \b in normal mode while in VIM, which will insert the text:

{% block  %}{% endblock %}

...and move your cursor to where you would type in the block's name. Finally, it puts you straight into insert mode so you can immediately type the block name and get to work. Alternatively, if you prefer to have the opening and closing block tags on separate lines, you could use:

nnoremap <Leader>b i{% block  %}<CR>{% endblock %}<Esc><Up>$2hi

This would insert:

{% block  %}
{% endblock %}

...and move your cursor to the same place as the other one, so you could start typing the block name. If you'd like to have access to both, you could change the letter that comes after <Leader> to whatever key you'd like. Pretty fancy stuff, eh?

I love it! I'm sure there are other, perhaps better, ways to accomplish the same thing. I am just excited that I figured it out on my own :)

Enjoy!

My VIM Adventures

Josh VanderLinden

Comments

Along with my recent adventures with Fedora 11, I decided to force myself to become more proficient with VIM. For those of you who do not know, VIM is based on perhaps one of the oldest surviving text editors around today. There are often religious-grade battles between those who believe in VIM and those who believe in Emacs, another long-surviving text editor. I'm not trying to get into any debates about which is better, and I'm not interested in why I should not be using VIM. If you still feel like I need to be set straight, please use the contact me form instead of the comments section.

Anyway, most people who use these editors fall into 1 of 3 categories (there are probably more categories actually):

  1. They're familiar with it enough to get the job done, but they're not exactly proficient. Therefore, they don't care about evangelizing the editor.
  2. They're proficient with the editor, but they're afraid of the politics involved in religious wars relating to text editors, so they don't evangelize.
  3. They're proficient with the editor and feel that the whole world would be better off if everyone used their preferred text editor. As such, they cannot shut up about the dang thing and drive all of their friends, coworkers, and acquaintances mad.

A few of you will probably agree with what I'm about to say. I fear I have transitioned from stage 1 to stage 3 fairly rapidly. I can't stop talking about VIM all of the sudden! You'd think it's the next best thing after sliced bread the way I've been blabbering about it. And here I am, writing an article about it. Hah.

Ever since I first started using Linux, I have been using vi to handle most of my text editing when I was in a terminal. I knew enough to get around. Basic things like navigation and inserting text were pretty much all I knew how to do. I dabbled with a tutorial here and there, but it wasn't long before the things I learned were lost, since I usually preferred a graphical text editor over VIM.

My recent experimentation with VIM has proved to be very fruitful, if I do say so myself. I am no longer tied down to some editor that is slow and bulky, I don't have much to worry about when I switch computers (chances are that VIM is on any computer I use regularly), and I don't even need to be sitting at the computer I'm using VIM on! In fact, today I was doing most of my work over an SSH session to my netbook. I felt more productive today than I have in a very long time.

It's been a long time since I've enjoyed using a mouse to perform basic tasks on my computer. Using VIM allows me to rid myself of the mouse entirely for my text editing tasks, and I don't feel at all limited in my capabilities. Things that used to be quite sketchy operations using my favorite graphical editors end up being very simple with VIM.

I also love the obscurity favor of it all.

Examples

I wish I could just keep adding stuff to this list! There are so many neat things I want to share with everyone about VIM! I'm sure there are more efficient ways to do some of the things I have been learning with VIM, but this works very well for me.

Laziness

I do a lot of reStructuredText for various things. In fact, I'm writing this article using VIM right now. ReST is fantastic, but it's horrible to do using an editor that is not set up with a mono spaced font. I like to see things nicely lined up (I'm a Python developer, after all). I also like to have my section headings have an underline that is as long as the heading itself. For example, the heading just above this looks like this:

Examples
========

In this particular instance, it's not a big deal to hold down the equals key long enough to underline the word "Examples". However, sometimes I get some pretty lengthy section titles. The lazy side of me doesn't want my finger to hang around on the same key for very long (or tap it dozens of times, for that matter). Also, trying to figure out how many characters are in a section title without a mono spaced font is very annoying.

The/a solution? Say I have a section heading that is 50 characters long. To underline it, all I have to do is type 50i= and hit the escape key.

Cutting Text Mid-Line

Another neat thing is being able to cut text from the cursor to a particular character somewhere later on (or earlier on!) in the same line. Say I have a hyperlink whose address I wish to change:

<a href="http://www.somelong.com/that/I/want/to/change/">Link Text</a>

Instead of using the mouse to highlight the href attribute's value (or highlight it using shift on the keyboard), I just position my cursor on the h in http and type dt". VIM will lop that address right out of there (and you can paste it elsewhere if you'd like). I used this particular shortcut countless times today as I replaced things like {% url some-named-url with,some,parameters %} with {{ some_object.get_absolute_url }} in some Django templates.

Search & Replace

And I cannot neglect the classic search and replace functionality in VIM. You can use fancy regular expressions in VIM to replace some text with something else. I was trying to do a little refactoring today, and I came up with a command like this:

:s/something/lambda (a,b,c): \0(a,b,c)/g

That sort of command works great to replace all occurrences of "something" on the current line with "lambda (a,b,c): something(a,b,c)". Fantastic. What about a global search and replace, instead of just the current line? Stash a % at the front of the command (:%s/something/lambda (a,b,c): \0(a,b,c)/g) and you're in business.

Now what if you only wanted to perform that search and replace over a certain group of lines instead of a single line or the whole file? This is one I'm particularly thrilled about:

:.,.+9 s/something/lambda (a,b,c): \0(a,b,c)/g

That little beauty will perform the search and replace on the current line and the following 9 lines. How awesome is that?

Moving & Deleting Words

Sometimes as I am writing something, I decide I would like to reword a sentence as I near the end. Sometimes this involves simply deleting a word or two. Sometimes it means chopping a few words out of the beginning part of a sentence to put them back at the end somewhere. Whatever the case, VIM seems to handle my needs perfectly well.

Say I have this sentence (from the Vimperator Web site): "Writing efficient user interfaces is the main maxim, here at Vimperator labs." If I want to move the "here at Vimperator labs" to the beginning of the sentence, assuming I just finished typing it, I would place my cursor over the period at the end, type dT,, hit ( to go to the beginning of the sentence, hit P to insert what I just copied, and then handle the rest of the clean up (capitalization, fixing the comma, etc). I could have also done something like, 4db instead of dT,.

If I want to cut/delete an entire word, or to the end of whatever word my cursor is currently on, I could use dw. For more than one word, just put a number before the command. It's great stuff!

Taking It Too Far

I've gotten so carried away with all of this VIM business. I really have. I installed vimperator in Firefox. This extension gives Firefox a VIM-like interface. Now I can do pretty much all of my regular surfing without using the mouse. Some may argue that this is absolutely impractical because it would take much longer to get to the right link on a page using the keyboard than it would with the mouse. That may be true. I dunno, but I still think it's awesome that I really don't need my mouse to browse the Internet now.

As I was playing with vimperator tonight, one of my buddies pointed out another useful extension called It's All Text. This extension allows you to use your preferred text editing program in regular old text boxes in Firefox. It is this extension which has just made writing my blog articles 200x more efficient. Now I can quickly and easily write my articles right here in VIM without having to copy and paste all over the place. Pretty dang incredible.

Oh yes, I'd like to thank Chad Hansen and Jonathan Geddes for helping me out as I explore the depths of VIM. You guys rock!

My Fedora 11 Adventures: Part III

Josh VanderLinden

Comments

Alrighty folks. Good night's rest? Check. Need to get work done? Check. Today's adventure will be about getting my computer set up for the regular development tasks that I need to do every day for my work and hobbies.

Getting Work Done

The first thing I noticed this morning when I turned on my computer was that it took exactly 1 minute from the time I hit the power button to the time I hit the enter key to log into my computer. Logging in took an additional 15-20 seconds. That was quite nice.

The next thing I noticed was that I was not connected to my network as I should be. Clicking the system tray menu item as I did last night did the trick, but I'm going to have to investigate how to make it connect automatically at boot.

Automatic Network Connectivity

It looks like I can have my Ethernet be activated automatically by right clicking on the network manager icon in my system tray, selecting "Edit Connections," selecting "System eth0," clicking the "Edit" button, and finally checking the "Connect automatically" option in the subsequent window. We'll see if this truly activates my connection next time I boot.

In an effort to get my wireless working, I poked around a little more in the "Edit Connections" screen, but I didn't see anything that seemed useful. I did find something that seemed a bit more interesting by selecting Applications > Administration > Network Configuration from the KDE menu. This utility suggested that my wireless adapter was actually wlan1 instead of the wlan0 that the tray icon seemed to think it was.

I tweaked a few settings about my wireless adapter, such as marking the "Activate device when computer starts" and "Allow all users to enable and disable the device." In the Hardware Device tab, I selected my actual Broadcom wireless adapter instead of the non-existant wlan0. I also hit the probe button next to the "Bind to MAC address" box.

My network manager tray icon still shows no wireless networks (of which there is no shortage around here), and running iwlist scan as root says "Network is down" next to wlan1. I think I will just mess with it later. Maybe it will "just work" when I reboot next time.

Installing/Configuring The Tools

As I previously mentioned, I prefer to use things that work well without getting in my way. When talking about text editors, VIM is just fine for me, and VIM 7.2.148 is already installed on my Fedora 11. One less thing to install.

Next up comes the installation of all of the goods for Firefox. It turns out that Fedora comes with Firefox 3.5 Beta 4--a bold move. I hope my extensions all work! The extensions I will be installing right now include:

  • AdBlock Plus: get rid of pesky ads that slow down my computer
  • Firebug: an amazing tool when debugging Web pages
  • Web Developer: has some niceties that Firebug doesn't come with
  • Screengrab: fantastic for taking screenshots of full Web pages
  • 2Zeus: my own little extension that allows me to quickly get short URLs a la tinyurl.com and is.gd

When I plugged in my external 1TB Seagate hard drive, I got a delicious Fatal Error message:

/images/fedora/p3/fatal_error.png

All appears to be in order, however, as I have access to all of the partitions on the external drive.

Next I want to install Opera. It appears that the place to look is Applications > System > Software Management in the KDE menu. Let's see what we have. Searching for Opera in the only obvious search box sent my computer into a crazy "let me do something without telling you" cycle. I have no idea what's really going on, but my processor has been maxed out for the past 3 minutes and my network has been working a little here and there. Can it really be that difficult to find a simple package? Oh! It finished! It took 6 minutes and 54 seconds to find nothing. Excellent. Let me look somewhere else.

Awesome. My computer is non-responsive. The hard drive is still working, but my GUI is doing nothing. I love it. Attempts to drop back to a trusty console using Control, Alt, and F1-F6 rendered no results. I wonder if I can SSH in from here... I sure can! Fantastic. Let's see what's happening.

It appears that X is taking up 90% of my processing power, but my computer is still not responding to any of my input. Dang it! Now my SSH session isn't working. Looks like the only option I have now is to do a hard reset. Joy of joys. Thank you for this opportunity, Fedora. Last time I did a hard reset, I was in Windows and it trashed my 1TB external.

So far rebooting seems to be going well. I wonder if my network will be setup properly still... Fantastic! It works! Wireless is still not available though. I can live without that for the time being.

Back in the Software Management utility, searching for Opera again proved to work much more quickly, but I didn't get any results. I suppose I'll just go download it from their site. The download for Opera 10 beta 1 is a mere 7.2MB, and it looks like it will open in the same Software Management utility that I've been dinking around in.

When I downloaded the Opera package, I asked it to open directly in the default program, KPackageKit. That doesn't seem to be working in the least, so I am going to try to just save it to my home directory and install it some other way. Sorry guys and gals, I ended up just dropping back to a terminal to run rpm -Uvh opera-10.00-b1.gcc4-shared-qt3.x86_64.rpm and that seemed to work fine. Opera appeared in my KDE menu, and it runs well now.

Next up is Pidgin. Pidgin 2.5.5 is installed by default, and getting it up and running was as trivial as ever.

Now to test Flash... YouTube, here I come!! Beh, Flash is not installed by default, and it's also not in the Software Management tool. What use is that thing?! Maybe if I apply all of the updates in the "Software Updates" section it will feel more useful... Here it goes.

Cool. System is unresponsive again. Let's see if I can reboot from here. Nope! Thank you, Fedora, for making me hard reset my system more in 2 hours than I have had to in YEARS. Yeah, thanks buddy.

10:50 AM So the software updates continue to not work. It appears that a ypbind package is the culprit which is causing everything to hang... I disabled it and tried to install the software updates again.

10:53 AM GUI is non-responsive again. Yay.

10:56 AM Third hard reset in 3 hours. Maybe I will have to modify my original parameters and try GNOME to see if that makes the computer usable for more than an hour at a time.

11:00 AM That's it! I'm getting rid of KDE 4... sorry folks, GNOME is my only hope of getting work done. Second clean shutdown out of 5 since the installation completed last night.

My Fedora 11 Adventures: Part I

Josh VanderLinden

Comments

Today I decided that I would deliberately put myself outside of my comfort zone. No, not by intentionally putting myself on a telephone for more than 5 minutes this month... I will need a lot more preparation before I can attempt that one. No no, today's experiment has to do with Linux. If you're new around here, I am a very big fan of Linux. It has been my primary operating system for over 8 years (but I still use Windows and Mac occasionally, when I need to test my programs and the cross-platform behavior).

A Little Background On Yours Truly

There was a time when I was what you would call a distro-hopper. I would download any and every Linux distribution I could get my hands on. Most of them would hang around on my computer for a few days at best, but a select few actually impressed me enough to have them stick around for longer. Among those few are Slackware and Sidux. Many other distros are nice and pretty, but when it comes to me being productive on them, there always seems to be something lacking.

I am addicted to speed and reliability--two things that originally urged me to tinker with Linux all those years ago. I am more than willing to sacrifice looks and features for being able to just get something done quickly and efficiently. As a matter of fact, I'm writing this article in VIM, one of the most "light-weight" editors around these days. It allows me to do exactly what I want to do without getting in my way. That's how I like things.

That's probably the main reason I love Slackware. It won't do anything I don't tell it to do. No crazy background processes updating some package repository, slowing down my system. No pestering me about security updates that I will install in my own due time. Slackware only does what I want it to, and I have learned a ton about Linux because of it. If I decide I want something automated in the background, I have to tell the computer to do it. If one of my programs has been updated on the Internet, I download and install the package manually instead of using a "package manager." If one of my programs doesn't work because of a missing dependency, I am the one who finds and downloads the dependency. It's a lot of work initially, but I'm of the persuasion that this work is well worth it for my situation.

In today's day and age, that sort of setup seems to scare a lot of people off. People like to have things "just work." People like to not have to worry about keeping up to speed with what security threats are out there. People like having things to keep them entertained instead of getting things done. People like to see their desktop turn into a cube and spin around. People like to see things glow and wiggle on their computer. It's aesthetically pleasing. There's nothing wrong with that. Unless you want to get things done instead of just stare at your computer.

The Challenge

With that background in mind, you should be equipped to better understand the information and articles that follow. My challenge to myself is this: install Fedora 11 and use it for at least a week. To add to the the challenge, I'm installing the 64-bit version. In my past experience with 64-bit operating systems, there has been no real motivation or necessity for 64-bit computing. It just means more compatibility problems, which reduces productivity. This will be the first 64-bit operating system I actually plan to keep around beyond the exploratory period.

There are a few things about this that will bring me waaaay out of my comfort zone. They are (in no particular order):

  • Fedora
  • RPMs
  • KDE 4

I have a strong disregard for each of these items. There was a time when I considered Fedora to be a respectable platform--back when it was Fedora Core 2 or 3. Ever since then, I feel that it has gone down the tubes. RPMs have always seemed grossly lacking in the speed department to me, and it only got worse after I found out about Debian and Slackware. Finally, KDE 4 seems like one of the absolute worst window managers I have yet to encounter. I love KDE 3.5.x. I wish I could use it everywhere I go. But KDE 4 has yet to appeal to my desire for efficient productivity--it gets in my way almost as much as GNOME does.

Starting today, I plan to look all of these opinions (as biased as they may be) straight in the eye and take 'em head-on. I am going to work on learning to enjoy using Fedora. I'm going to work on learning how to appreciate RPMs. I am going to learn to be productive in the window manager "of the future."

And I will keep you all apprised of my progress.