Shell history can tell a lot about its owner. What’s in your shell?

history | awk '{CMD[$2]++;count++;}
END { for (a in CMD)print CMD[a] " " CMD[a]/count*100 "% " a;}'
| grep -v "./" | column -c3 -s " " -t | sort -nr | nl |  head -n10

     1  580  38.0328%    git         # I keep everything under VCS
     2  202  13.2459%    cd          # Moving around a lot
     3  171  11.2131%    vi          # Favorite text editor
     4  127  8.32787%    ls          # I'm a curious person
     5  43   2.81967%    rm          # I also like when it's clean
     6  26   1.70492%    usrswitch   # https://gist.github.com/ruslanosipov/5453510
     7  25   1.63934%    exit        # I don't like hitting the red cross button
     8  18   1.18033%    source      # Reloading bash configuration files
     9  17   1.11475%    clear       # Like when it's *really* clean
    10  15   0.983607%   gitk        # Sometimes it is too messy for git log

A round-up of The Week Without Colorful Prompt.

I worked with the colors disabled in bash, git, and vim for a week. So how did it go? It is definitely an interesting experience, but such a harsh change that it doesn’t really work out with everything.

Bash

Disabling colorful PS1 and removing color output for ls commands forced me to concentrate more on the actual text, changing the perception of the general bash workflow. I was more concentrated on the task, missed less details, and generally paid more attention to the output.

Git

Never repeat my mistake by disabling colors for git diff. Log and status are fairly easy to read, but the disabling of colors noticeably slows down the workflow.

Vim

Vim without code highlight forces you to remember your code structure more effectively, which is a great thing. Not having a need to rely on color can hint that a programmer has better understanding of the code he/she is writing.

Now that the experiment is over I have mostly returned to using colorful prompt. But I do turn syntax highlight off once in a while - it allows you to see problems from new angle and work more efficiently at finding a solution. Try it and see for yourself!

I noticed that I rely on colors in the bash terminal a lot, as in git output, diffs, directory and file listings… It gets worse when using vim - I feel lost without the cozy syntax highlight guidance.

Time to stop using output colors for a week whether in shell, git, or vim, and use only plain text with no fancy colors. Set git config –global color.ui false and don’t use –color flags in shell. Also, set syntax off and set a simple color scheme for vim.

What can I gain from all this? It will definitely reduce my productivity for a few days. However, I have a hint of an idea that changing the visual code representation will give me new insight on what I am currently writing.

Link to related commit on GutHub.

Check back in a week to see how it went!

You can open the current command you are typing for editing in your default text editor by pressing Ctrl + x + e. It will be executed after you write and quit the file. This is perfect for editing long/multi-line commands where typos are likely to occur. Consider something like this:

for run in {1..10}
do
    echo "Print me ten times"
done

Editing this in vim is much more satisfying, isn’t it?

You can also open the last executed command for editing if you execute the fc command. You can also edit the last command starting with a certain pattern using fc [pattern] (you can skip the editor and execute the output of fc by adding the -s option, and a useful tip is to have alias r="fc -s", which would allow you to execute the last command starting with “cc” by running r cc).

P.S: In order for this trick to open vim and not any other editor, make sure you have the line EDITOR=vim in your ~/.bashrc. Obviously this works with any text editor.

This is a step by step tutorial on how to organize your vim config files using git, pathogen, and git submodules. This tutorial assumes that you are familiar with git basics, but you don’t really need to understand every step in order to follow it. For simplicity, only .vim directory is a repository in this example. You may want to have all your dotfiles under version control and use a script to symlink files to the home directory. For example see https://github.com/ruslanosipov/dotfiles.

Setting up

Let’s assume your .vim directory is a mess and is not under revision control. Let’s initialize a repository.

cd ~/.vim
git init
git remote add origin git@github.com:user/project.git

Now let’s create .vim/bundle directory and clone pathogen plugin as a submodule.

mkdir bundle
cd bundle
git submodule add git@github.cfm:tpope/vim-pathogen.git
bundle/vim-pathogen

Pre-pend the following code to your ~/.vimrc to load pathogen from non-default directory:

runtime bundle/vim-pathogen/autoload/pathogen.vim
execute pathogen#infect()

Let’s add some more plugins as git submodules, for example:

git submodule add git@github.com:Lokaltog/vim-easymotion.git
bundle/vim-easymotion

Now we can add and commit everything and push it to a repository.

git add .
git commit -m "Use pathogen to keep track of vim plugins"
git push origin master

Deploying

Assuming that your repository is located at git@github.com:user/project.git:

cd ~
git clone git@github.com:user/project.git .vim

And you are done, all plugins are downloaded from their repositories now.

Maintaining

Git submodules keep track of specific commits and are not being automatically updated when target repositories have new commits. In order to update plugins you have:

cd ~/.vim
git submodule foreach git pull
git add bundle
git commit -m "Updated all the plugins in a bundle"
git push origin master

You probably want to make sure that new versions of plugins are compatible with each other before committing, however.