Book Image

The Software Developer's Guide to Linux

By : David Cohen, Christian Sturm
5 (2)
Book Image

The Software Developer's Guide to Linux

5 (2)
By: David Cohen, Christian Sturm

Overview of this book

Developers are always looking to raise their game to the next level, yet most are completely lost when it comes to the Linux command line. This book is the bridge that will take you to the next level in your software development career. Most of the skills in the book can be immediately put to work to make you a more efficient developer. It’s written specifically for software engineers, not Linux system administrators, so each chapter will equip you with just enough theory to understand what you’re doing before diving into practical commands that you can use in your day-to-day work as a software developer. As you work through the book, you’ll quickly absorb the basics of how Linux works while you get comfortable moving around the command line. Once you’ve got the core skills, you’ll see how to apply them in different contexts that you’ll come across as a software developer: building and working with Docker images, automating boring build tasks with shell scripts, and troubleshooting issues in production environments. By the end of the book, you’ll be able to use Linux and the command line comfortably and apply your newfound skills in your day-to-day work to save time, troubleshoot issues, and be the command-line wizard that your team turns to.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
18
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19
Index

vi(m)

vi (often ex-vi or nvi) is a command-line text editor. Vim (VI iMproved) is an extended version, that many people use as an entire IDE. vi and vim share the same basic commands and keyboard bindings, so if you just learn the basics, you’ll be fine no matter what kind of ancient or modern system you log into.

The nice thing about learning vim is that you can use it locally on your laptop, or remotely on a server, and the editing experience is exactly the same (beautifully efficient) in both places.

Vim is a modal editor, meaning that the same keys do different things depending on which “mode” you’re in. For example when you’re in insert mode, your keypresses will simply be written into the file (or buffer) you’re editing – much like your IDE or Microsoft Word. However in normal mode, pressing those same letter keys will execute whatever keybinding they are tied to. Once you’ve adjusted to that idea – “modal editing...