Determining a Personal Data Retention Strategy

If you enjoy the command line then you don’t need to be sold on efficiency
or purity of action. But even those who grok CLI are unaware of a number of
ways to be more elegant accomplishing their tasks. Here are a few of my
favorites.

1. Remap Your CAPSLOCK Key

2. Use ctrl-r For History Autocomplete

3. Switch to iTerm on OS X

4. Switch to Zsh

5. Remap your Vim Escape Key

6. Remap your Vim Leader Key

7. Use vi-mode in Your Shell

8. Add tmux to Your Workflow

9. Synchronize Your Environments

1. Remap Your CAPSLOCK Key

When was the last time you used your CAPSLOCK key? Yeah, me too. It’s a
relic, and it’s right there on the home line wasting useful real estate.
Let’s make it functional by remapping it to the Control key!
Here‘s how to do it in various operating systems.

Now you can stay on your home keys and hit ctrl-whatever with your pinky to
the left the ‘a’ key.

2. Using ctrl-r to Search and Auto-complete from History

Many know about using the arrow keys to invoke previous commands from
history, but relatively few know that you can invoke ctrl-r to be brought to
a history auto-complete prompt.

Once you find what you were looking for you can hit enter and execute it or
you can modify it before doing so. And now that your CAPSLOCK key is
remapped, it’s easy to get in the habit.

3. Move to iTerm on OS X

iTerm
isn’t necessarily an efficiency, but it’s definitely an improvement. Some
features:

• Split panes

• Mouseless copy

• Paste history

• Full screen

• Unixyness

• Expose tabs

• Tagged profiles

I’ve never known anyone to switch to iTerm and then switch back. Definitely
give it a go.

4. Switch to Zsh as Your Shell

Most come up using Bash as I did, and have to be shown the merits of another
shell. After having multiple people rave about it I gave it a chance and
haven’t gone back. Some features:

• Expand [remote] paths ve/pl/re –> vendor/plugins/redmine

• Expand variables: $PATH –> /your/full/path

• Intelligent correction: /pbulic/html becomes /public/html

• Spelling correction

• Shared command history across running shells

• Highly themable prompts

• Most of your Bash configuration will work seamlessly

• Can emulate Bash when run as /bin/sh

• Supports vim mode commands

• OhMyZsh
  support

The last one is critical, as ohmyzsh makes using the shell an
absolute pleasure by including a massive number of plugins (rails, git, OS
X, brew, etc.), over 80 terminal themes, and an auto-updater. Definitely
give it a try.

5. Remap Your ESCAPE Key in Vim

Having multiple modes in vim isn’t so much of an issue; it’s more that it
sucks to move between them. The ESC key is a bit out of the way, and it
doesn’t need to be. The first thing I do when I stand up a new vim
environment is add some mappings to my .vimrc.

inoremap jj <ESC>

6. Remap Your Leader Key in Vim

If you’re not familiar with the leader key and what it can do for you, you
should start there. It basically serves as the activation key for shortcuts
you can define. So you can say:

nnoremap j VipJ

This will make it so that pressing your leader key combined with the letter
‘j’ will visually select the entire paragraph and then join the lines in it.

I personally use the comma key ‘,’ as my leader since the concept is barely
moving off of my home keys. So here I can activate all my shortcuts by using
‘,’, and leave insert mode by pressing ‘jj’. You can map it like so in your
.vimrc:

let mapleader = “,”

7. Use vi-mode in Your Shell

Whether you’re using zsh or bash you want to be using the same muscle memory
as much as possible, and if you’re a vim user that means switching your
shell from Emacs mode (default) to vi mode.

This means you edit your shell commands the same way you edit inside vim:

Get a weekly breakdown of what’s happening in security and tech—and why it matters.

• b to go back a word

• dd to delete the entire line

• 0, $ to move to the line ends

• …etc.

You do this by adding the following line to your .zshrc or .bashrc file:

bindkey -v

You can also map your alternate escape key just as you do in vim (shown for
zsh):

bindkey -M viins ‘jj’ vi-cmd-mode

Another added bonus here is that you navigate your history via j,k as will
come natural, and you can even have your ctrl-r functionality as well by
adding this to your .zshrc file:

bindkey ‘^R’ history-incremental-search-backward

8. Add tmux to Your Workflow

tmux is a terminal multiplexer, which allows you to connect to and manage
multiple server-side terminal sessions. You can spin them up, connect to
them, disconnect from them, and then connect to them another time or from
somewhere else.

You may be familiar with a similar solution, GNU Screen, but tmux has
a number of advantages
over screen:

• screen is a largely dead project, and its code has significant issues

• tmux is an active project with a modern, efficient codebase

• tmux is completely client/server based whereas screen tries to emulate
  this behavior

• tmux supports both vim and emacs key layouts

• tmux supports autorenaming windows based on what’s running

• tmux is easily scriptable from the shell

• vertical window splitting is native in tmux, as opposed to being bolted
  on and buggy in screen

If you’re not using terminal multiplexing, give tmux a try and enjoy the
benefits. [ UPDATE: I now have
a full primer on tmux
here. ]

9. Synchronize Your Environments

It’s quite annoying to have a brilliant shell and vim experience on your
MBP, only to have it look and feel completely different when you SSH into
your Linux boxes. Fix that by syncing up.

1. Create a
   git
   repository for all your customization files, e.g., Bash, Zsh, Vim, etc.
   and keep it updated.

2. Go to each of your systems that you use and clone that directory so that
   you’re working with one set of files across your environments.

3. A commenter mentioned using Dropbox for synchronization as well, which
   seems attractive, but I’m not sure how clean that would be on headless
   Linux servers.

Ping me with similar tips so I can incorporate them into my workflow and add
them here for others.