See also:

• tldr — collection of community-maintained help pages for command-line tools
• explainshell — write down a command-line to see the help text that matches each argument
• General purpose command-line tools — examples for most common usecases
• Bash reference cheatsheet — nicely formatted and explained well
• Bash scripting cheatsheet — quick reference to getting started with Bash scripting

As per the manual, "Mappings are set up to work like most click-and-type editors" - which is best suited with GUI Vim.

While Vim doesn't make sense to use without the modes, there are plugins like https://github.com/tombh/novim-mode!

I start my search string with stackoverflow as a workaround.

oxipng, pngquant and svgcleaner for optimizing images

auto-editor for removing silent portions from video recordings

Hope you find the book useful :)

I'd also suggest these shorter guides to get started:

• https://ferd.ca/awk-in-20-minutes.html
• https://backreference.org/2010/02/10/idiomatic-awk/
• https://earthly.dev/blog/awk-examples/

EPUB reader

alias a='alias'

a c='clear'
a p='pwd'
a e='exit'
a q='exit'

a h='history | tail -n20'
# turn off history, use 'set -o history' to turn it on again
a so='set +o history'

a b1='cd ../'
a b2='cd ../../'
a b3='cd ../../../'
a b4='cd ../../../../'
a b5='cd ../../../../../'

a ls='ls --color=auto'
a l='ls -ltrhG'
a la='l -A'
a vi='gvim'
a grep='grep --color=auto'

# open and source aliases
a oa='vi ~/.bash_aliases'
a sa='source ~/.bash_aliases'

# sort file/directory sizes in current directory in human readable format
a s='du -sh -- * | sort -h'

# save last command from history to a file
# tip, add a comment to end of command before saving, ex: ls --color=auto # colored ls output
a sl='fc -ln -1 | sed "s/^\s*//" >> ~/.saved_commands.txt'
# short-cut to grep that file
a slg='< ~/.saved_commands.txt grep'

# change ascii alphabets to unicode bold characters
a ascii2bold="perl -Mopen=locale -Mutf8 -pe 'tr/a-zA-Z/𝗮-𝘇𝗔-𝗭/'"

### functions
# 'command help' for command name and single option - ex: ch ls -A
# see https://github.com/learnbyexample/command_help for a better script version
ch() { whatis $1; man $1 | sed -n "/^\s*$2/,/^$/p" ; }

# add path to filename(s)
# usage: ap file1 file2 etc
ap() { for f in "$@"; do echo "$PWD/$f"; done; }

# simple case-insensitive file search based on name
# usage: fs name
# remove '-type f' if you want to match directories as well
fs() { find -type f -iname '*'"$1"'*' ; }

# open files with default application, don't print output/error messages
# useful for opening docs, pdfs, images, etc from command line
o() { xdg-open "$@" &> /dev/null ; }

# if unix2dos and dos2unix commands aren't available by default
unix2dos() { sed -i 's/$/\r/' "$@" ; }
dos2unix() { sed -i 's/\r$//' "$@" ; }

I use GitHub pages and mdbook (https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook)

Check out https://github.com/auctors/free-lunch (list of free Windows software)

See also https://www.nirsoft.net/ (freeware, not open source)

Check out https://github.com/HollyAdele/awesome-programming-for-kids

https://github.com/WyattBlue/auto-editor - automatically editing video and audio by analyzing a variety of methods, most notably audio loudness

https://github.com/shssoichiro/oxipng, https://pngquant.org/ and https://github.com/RazrFalcon/svgcleaner for optimizing images

I've written books on regex too, if you are interested in learning ;)

I have a book for Perl One-Liners as well, which I'm currently revising :)

Here are some resources that might help:

• https://github.com/jlevy/the-art-of-command-line
• https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/series/unix-as-ide/
• https://missing.csail.mit.edu/

For scripting, keep these links handy:

• https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ and https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls
• https://www.shellcheck.net/

Also, +1 for Linux Journey mentioned in another comment.

I had to learn Linux CLI tools, Vim and Perl at my very first job. Have a soft spot for Perl, despite not using it much these days other than occasional one-liners (mainly for advanced regex features).

• https://jvns.ca/
• https://mathspp.com/
• https://thepythoncodingstack.substack.com/
• https://codeconfessions.substack.com/

See also: https://github.com/pllk/cphb (Competitive Programmer's Handbook)

Yeah, it is uncommon spelling, but if you google, you'll find it's not that rare ;)

Inspired by explainshell, I wrote a script (https://github.com/learnbyexample/command_help) to be used from the terminal itself. It is a bit buggy, but works well most of the time. For example:

$ ch grep -Ao
       grep - print lines that match patterns

       -A NUM, --after-context=NUM
              Print NUM lines of trailing context after matching lines.  Places a
              line containing a group separator (--) between contiguous groups of
              matches.  With the -o or --only-matching option, this has no effect
              and a warning is given.

       -o, --only-matching
              Print  only  the matched (non-empty) parts of a matching line, with
              each such part on a separate output line.

You can do it in Bash as well. Put this in .inputrc:

"\e[A":history-substring-search-backward
"\e[B":history-substring-search-forward

# or, if you want to search only from the start of the command
"\e[A": history-search-backward
"\e[B": history-search-forward

Thanks a lot for the feedback on Coreutils book! It's so nice to hear that it helped in your thesis.

Regarding the ebook versions, I use pandoc to convert GitHub style Markdown to PDF/EPUB (wrote a blog post about my process here: https://learnbyexample.github.io/customizing-pandoc/). I had to search through stackexchange threads to customize the few things I could. I don't know how to fix the kind of page breaks you mentioned. But, I'll try to find a solution. Thanks again for the feedback :)

Thanks a lot for the kind words! Means a lot to me :)

I'm self-published and haven't worked for other publications. Sometimes, my submissions reach HN front page, so you might have seen there or because others picked it up from there and shared around elsewhere.

Check out https://novelwriter.io/

I'm not familiar with such softwares (I use pandoc for technical writing), but might help you..

Thanks! 😊

You're welcome, happy learning :)

Not my blog, just sharing it here. Saw it on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40419325)

That depends on the regex flavor. Some of them have full support for variable length lookbehinds, for example JavaScript and third-party regex module for Python.

That's great to hear and thanks for the kind feedback :)

I use GVim for coding and text editing in general.

Programming wise, CLI tools (grep, sed, awk, sort, head, etc) are enough for most of my tasks. I've written a few Python TUI projects (uses Textual framework) but these are around 300-400 lines, so Vim is more than enough for my purposes. Don't even need any plugins.

Is it regex or sed/awk syntax (or both) that gives you trouble?

I had similar reaction and didn't even try to learn them for years - then I caught the stackoverflow craze of answering CLI questions (and learning from others).

I have a list of learning resources for CLI tools and scripting here: https://learnbyexample.github.io/curated_resources/linux_cli_scripting.html

I've also written a few TUI interactive apps to practice text processing commands like grep, sed, awk, coreutils, etc: https://github.com/learnbyexample/TUI-apps

I have a concise guide at https://learnbyexample.github.io/cli-computing/searching-files-and-filenames.html#grep and a more detailed book at https://learnbyexample.github.io/learn_gnugrep_ripgrep/introduction.html. Both have examples and exercises.

The post isn't about terminal frameworks though, it is about how to get started using the command line.

I used to use it for posting on Twitter, with some keywords (like book title) in bold.

What's the difference between two_percent and skim?

Not my blog, just sharing it here.

That said, I don't see that broken rectangle on Chromium.

Why do you think it is a phishing link? Gumroad is a well known platform to sell digital goods.

I mention it is free up to some date because it will go back to being a paid product after that.

Can't reproduce your issue:

$ line='2023-06-19T00:00:00+01:00 2023-06-18T00:00:00+01:00 2023-06-17T00:00:00+01:00 2023-06-16T00:00:00+01:00 2023-06-15T00:00:00+01:00 2023-06-14T00:00:00+01:00 2023-06-13T00:00:00+01:00 2023-06-10T00:00:00+01:00 2023-06-03T00:00:00+01:00 2023-05-31T00:00:00+01:00 2023-05-27T00:00:00+01:00'
$ arr=( $line )
$ echo "${arr[4]}"
2023-06-15T00:00:00+01:00