Efficient Linux at the Command Line

Chapter 11. Final Time-Savers

I’ve had a lot of fun writing this book, and I hope you’ve had fun reading it too. For the last act, let’s cover a bunch of smaller topics that didn’t quite fit into the earlier chapters. These topics have made me a better Linux user, and maybe they’ll help you as well.

Quick Wins

The following time-savers are simple to learn in a few minutes.

Jumping Into Your Editor from less

When you’re viewing a text file with less and want to edit the file, don’t exit less. Just press v to launch your preferred text editor. It loads the file and places the cursor right at the spot you were viewing in less. Exit the editor and you’re back in less at the original location.

For this trick to work best, set the environment variable EDITOR and/or VISUAL to an editing command. These environment variables represent your default Linux text editor that may be launched by various commands, including less, lynx, git, crontab, and numerous email programs. For example, to set emacs as your default editor, place either of the following lines (or both) in a shell configuration file and source it:

VISUAL=emacs
EDITOR=emacs

If you don’t set these variables, your default editor is whatever your Linux system sets it to be, which is usually vim. If you end up inside of vim and you don’t know how to use it, don’t panic. Quit vim by pressing the Escape key and typing :q! (a colon, the letter q, and an exclamation point), then press Enter. To quit emacs, press Ctrl-X followed by ...