Also, Terminal User Interfaces are a nice middle ground between learning terminal commands and having a GUI.

Yes, TUIs definitely help reduce possible stress and fear of complexity for new users.

Thanks for the git link, didn’t know that, just starred it :)

Yeah, linux-servers without the tools installed in your PC are a hassle. That’s why I learned to work with vim, as that’s in nearly every distro’s repo.

I recommended atuin as I was using it before, but currently I am using ohmyzsh with the fzf plugin for zsh. This has a very atuin-like interface and handling, but as a plugin for zsh itself.

Saved! Thank you so much.

I’ve used Linux full-time since late 2020 and I never knew about ctrl+y and ctrl+u.

I’d also like to contribute some knowledge.

aliases

You can put these into your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc or whatever shell you use.

###
### ls aliases
###
# ls = colors
alias ls='ls --color=auto'

# ll = ls + human readable file sizes
alias ll='ls -lh --color=auto'

# lla = ll + show hidden files and folders
alias lla='ls -lah --color=auto'

###
### other aliases
###
# set color for different commands
alias diff='diff --color=auto'
alias grep='grep --color=auto'
alias ip='ip --color=auto'

# my favourite way of navigating to a far-off folder
# this scans my home folder and presents me with a list of
#    fuzzy-searchable folders
#    you need fzf and fd installed for this alias to work
alias cdd='cd "$(sudo fd -t d . ${HOME} | fzf)"'

recommendations

ncdu - a shell-based tool to analyze disk usage, think GNOME’s baobab or KDE’s filelight but in the terminal

zellij - tmux but easy and with nice colors

atuin - shell history but good, fuzzy-searchable. If you still have the basic shell history (when pressing ctrl+r), I cannot recommend this enough.

ranger - a terminal file-browser (does everything I need and way more)

Ha, that would’ve helped me a few times. Good to know!

Still, I wouldn’t switch vim for nano ever again. nano is a good and easy start, but I think if you do more than just basic editing of a few files every now and then, learning vim is the way to go.

vim is pretty customizable, widespread and it has been around for quite some time after all. If you think you need it, somebody most likely already made it as a vim-plugin :)

vim was such an unimaginable improvement over nano for doing stuff on linux servers. Having an in-shell-editor search-and-replace function alone is worth everything you have to do to learn vim.

And after I was comfortable around vim because of all the “training” on servers, I just switched to vim fulltime. No more GUI editor for me!