[sf-lug] FWIW and :r! dig -t ns sf-lug.com

[Christian Einfeldt]

Hi Alex,

On 10/24/07, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
>
>
> > and
> > what is ment by
> > :r!
> > ????
>
> Meaningful to anyone who knows the "vi" editor.  ;->
>

Alex, I feel your pain, here, as Clinton said.  I didn't know what that
meant either.  Hanging out on a list like this is good for your brain,
because you will learn stuff through osmosis.  vi is an important text
editor because it is really old and because it can run in a virtual shell. A
virtual shell is important, because sometimes the eye candy that runs on top
of Linux can get goobered up and locked and stalled, but Linux is still
humming away happily underneath.  If your keyboard is responsive, sometimes
you can get rid of the programs that are causing your computer to freeze up,
without having to reboot the computer, which is a really useful tool.

So try depressing your cntrl and alt keys at the same time, and then touch
the F3 key.  Your screen will go black, and you will get the virtual shell.
You will be asked for a login, which means you can enter the same user name
and password that you used to get into GNOME or KDE.  (I seem to recall you
use GNOME on your desktop).  Don't worry, your GNOME programs are all still
functioning; you just can't see them.  To bet back to your GNOME programs,
you just have to depress your cntrl and alt keys again, and hit the F7 key,
and boom, you are back as if nothing changed.

When you are in the virtual shell, you can do lots of important and useful
stuff, such as kill runaway processes (locked programs), as well as use the
vi editor.  (To pronounce vi, say "vee eye").  For example, I'm pretty sure
that I say Daniel Gimpelevich, another SF Linux user, use vi to help another
new user, Charles Francis, solve a problem that Charles was having with a
fancy video card.  I *think* that Daniel used vi to edit a config file for
the monitor or for the card or something like that. It was really fast and
snappy, and boom, Daniel solved that problem quickly.

In other words, the power of vi is that it lets you solve really deep
problems when all of the GNOME programs are just too locked up to solve the
problems.  The other thing that is powerful about vi is that it is useful
with all or nearly all Linux programs.  Once you learn it, you don't have to
worry about what you are going to do if your X quits or locks.

Learning vi is really hard, though.  I tried a little bit, and it really
kicked my ass.  heh.

Thanks for asking that question.  I didn't know what it was either.

see ya
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