Without a doubt, I wish I learnt a bit of vim and screen earlier on in my Linux journey. Although I now use both tools on a semi-regular basis, I would still be considered an amateur - knowing only the basic commands. However, the truth is you only need the basic commands to get a lot of work done!
Here is my hack guide to using vim and screen in order to save yourself a lot of pain for the simple things; without trying to know or do everything in the terminal.
vim
Vim has two modes: insert, command.
To go into insert mode from command mode press i. Thats all we’re going to cover in this guide.
To go to command mode, press esc. From here there are probably only a handful of commands you need to know. Below are them in order of importance:
:q!- quit without saving or the “whoops, lets try that again”:wq- save and quitdd- delete the linedw- delete the whole current wordu- undo the last command
That’s it! Of course vim has lots of rich commands which you could take further, but for now thats enough to be dangerous.
screen
Screen can be initialised by simply running screen. To enter a command, use ctrl+a, then:
c: create new shell?: helpk: kill sessionn: next screen0-9: go to screen 0-9ctrl+a: toggle with previous screen
Screen is much easier to use simply because the help documentation presents you with all the possible commands! The above will probably be more than enough for most sessions in the terminal.