marklgr

Could you elaborate?

I've been using the Boldvoice app (no affiliation), it's not perfect but pretty good; my spoken English has definitely improved in a few months. I would recommend it.

Can't be natural selection, can it? Sheer luck?

If someone finds a way, I'm in.

FWIW, if you just like the filename on the left, you still can save forks with:

`<quux grep xkcd`

> But we should look at what Lua did for Neovim. There has been an explosion of development effort now that Neovim finally added a reasonable programming interface.

It is very much debatable whether Lua is the "reasonable programming interface" causing the activity in Neovim. Vimscript has many flaws, one of them being that it doesn't look like other programming languages, but it does its specialized job pretty well. It is slow, but efforts are made in that area. Lua is well designed but it certainly has its shortcomings too, and many argue (me included) that programming in Lua is not that pleasant. The Lua bindings have been available in Vim for quite some time, but they never were popular, for some reasons.

Anyway, it is not directly related to your point, but I think that example is not that compelling.

Reading the docs and searching into it on a regular basis is the single best advice I could give to Vim users wanting to improve. The odd cheatsheet, the post with a few tricks and cool plugins, all those can be well and good, but nothing beats sitting down and reading the docs. I've been use Vim daily for 10+ years, and I still check help files very regularly. Knowing _how_ to search efficiently is also a skill worth acquiring.

Incidentally, the same advice apply to Bash: just read the man page, and search into it each time it is needed. It is just worth it.

> "If you have to write more than 10 lines, then use a real language"

I swear, there should be a HN rule against those. It pollutes every single Shell discussions, bringing nothing to them and making it hard for others do discuss the real topic.

It's a case of knowing the wooledge website (and working with shellcheck), or not. Picking snippets on stackoverflow will probably do more harm than good, tbh.

I still remember 3223 :)

Did you hang out at Maubert Electronics? I also recall a few RTC servers, blast from the past!

Good book, for all levels, I recall stealing several snippets into my cheatsheet.

String bets not allowed, whatever their encoding ;)

Not OP, but I would say that we, regular Bash users, don't really write complex programs in Bash, even though it depends on what you call "complex". Some of our programs can be pretty long, and we can do more within Bash than some programmers know (eg. the arrays/associative arrays features, the vast parameter expansion options etc.), so no, we aren't bound to some 100-line-max rule, if that's what you had in mind.

Bash (and other shells) are very good at working with other programs and using the filesystem. It's true you have to know many idioms, but once you're there, you can be quite productive for these kinds of tasks.