Vim and Tmux

Vim

You will probably hate using Vim at first.

Using a command-line text editor is a vital process skill and Vim is both ubiquitous and well-supported, with a rich collection of plugins that can make your life easier.

There are several tutorials and cheet sheets online. One is even built into Vim itself!

Run vimtutor for an interactive tutorial inside of Vim.
This is a decent basics cheat sheet.
This is a more detailed cheat sheet.
Vim Adventures is a cute game that helps you learn the basic movement commands (these will come in useful!). The full game is not free, but the free preview has good coverage of basic movement.

This parody of Vim users is spot-on.

tmux

ssh attempts to make connections persistent. However, like any other application running on the network, you will drop an ssh connection when you disconnect from the internet. This can be frustrating when you’re in the middle of working!

One way to prevent this frustration is to create a persistent terminal session on the remote machine–think of this like a set of windows that you can disconnect from and reconnect to. tmux is a program that allows you to do this.

I highly recommend that you invest a little time in learning how to use tmux to have multiple windows open in one ssh window and to be able to quit and reconnect to an existing session. Here’s a couple of tutorials:

Note that these tutorials may ask you install software. You can’t install software on Lily–you don’t have the proper permissions. But, you shouldn’t need to; I have installed all the software necessary for success in this class.