Stop Suffering Through Long Shell Commands

Maybe I've been living under a rock and this is already common knowledge, but I've just made a great discovery for my workflow and I felt like sharing it with you. So, here we go. I have a pretty long shell command here. And let's say I want to edit something at the very end of this line here. I believe most normie users would come in here and keep hitting the arrow keys until they arrive at the position so that they can make the edit. But if you're following this channel or similar channels, you're probably already aware that there's a VI mode in most shells. I'm using Zshell, for example, and it has a built-in VI mode. So, as long as it's activated, I can hit escape and then navigate around this input using Vim Motions much more efficiently. But what I didn't realize until now is that you can even edit this command inside of Neoim directly. And this of course gives you access to all the plugins. You can use macros and all of that kind of stuff which is amazing. Unfortunately, this behavior doesn't work out of the box and it needs a little bit of configuration. It is quite straightforward but nevertheless you have to know about it. So that's what I want to show in this video. In order to configure this, let's open up our zshrc file. And here we want to add the following lines. bind key-v. This enables vi mode in the first place. And then we set the key time out to one. This makes switching between modes quicker. Then this is where the magic happens, right? So we want to set the editor environment variable to neoim. This determines the editor that will be used. Then we want to pull from the zsh user contribution function library the edit command line function and we want to register it with the zsh line editor. Once we've done that, we can bind a key to it. So we can say if we are in vi command mode and we press v then we want to run this function and that's basically how this works. So this is already enough to set up the command line editing with neoim but personally I like to add a few more configurations here to properly set up vi mode. The first thing I want to do is export this environment variable vi mode set cursor to true. And after that I have a function here keymap select. This is a reserved hook that gets triggered every time the key map changes. So if we go from insert mode to command mode for example. So then we can check if our current key map is command mode. And if that's the case, we want to print the block cursor and if not we want the cursor to be a beam shape and then we of course need to register that with the Zsh line editor. Next a similar function. This is also a reserved hook that line init and that one gets triggered every time a new session starts up. So at the very beginning we want to be in insert mode and the cursor shape should be a beam. And finally we want to set up the yanking to system clipboard. So I have another function here vi yank clipboard and I also register it and set a key map to it. So if we are in vi command mode and press Y then this function gets executed and what's happening here is that the current cut buffer. So basically what is being selected gets piped into the pb copy command which is the utility that we can use to copy to system clipboard on Mac OS. If you're on Linux then maybe you want to use something else here like Xclipip or something like that that is a bit system dependent. But yeah, so that's pretty much all we need to get a proper VI mode going and be able to edit everything in Neoim. Another thing I wanted to point out is that if bash is your shell, you don't need to configure this behavior of editing the current command input in neoim. If you have the editor environment variable set up, then you can just hit Ctrl XRL C and you will get that kind of out of the box without having to autoload the edit command line and all that kind of stuff that is Zsh specific. And the other thing is if you're using my ZSH, I'm now in the GitHub repo. There's a plugin here, VI mode, and that plugin basically does exactly what we just set up manually. So, if you're using Omi ZSH, then I would recommend you go with the VI mode plug-in instead. And you can even see in the plug-in code itself that yes, here it is basically doing exactly what we just did except then uh you have it as part of the plug-in and also some other things that come with it out of the box, which might be nice. I personally don't use my ZSH because I feel it's quite bloated and comes with a lot of things I don't need. But if you're anyways using it then the VI mode as I mentioned would be my recommendation here. Now let's do a final check if everything is working as expected. So let's source our Zsh file. And now let's paste our command from earlier. And then yes, we can navigate around using vi mode. And if I go into insert mode, then the cursor shape changes. And if I hit V, we go directly into Neoim. We can make some edits here. And if I go out, then we have the edited command input right here. Perfect. So, hope you liked it and let me know what you think if you already knew this or if this was new to you as well. Cheers.

Editing long shell commands sucks. You make one typo halfway through, and suddenly you're redoing the whole thing. In this video, I'll show how to make that a non-issue: enabling Vim mode in Zsh, setting custom cursor styles, and adding a shortcut to edit your current command directly in Neovim . No plugins, no oh-my-zsh, just built-in Zsh features. 🛠️ Gear I use (affiliate links) These are the tools I actually use every day. If you end up grabbing something through these links, I get a small kickback (no extra cost to you), which helps keep the channel going. Split keyboard: https://keeb.io/products/iris-ce-keyboard-kit?ref=henrymisc