Linux UpSkill Challenge Day 4 through 6 - Installing applications, tab complete and vim + vimtutor

Days 4 through 6 covers how to actually install applications remotely, some quality of life commands to make using the command line better, and vim.  Since these are things I have some familiarity with I figured it'd be best to go over vimtutor here as opposed to in a 100DaysofCode post when I start that up again as it is relevant.

Day 4 goes through how to use the apt command in Ubuntu to install applications from the official repositories.  Whichever linux distribution you install will have a list of repositories installed by default.  You can browse the official Ubuntu repository here, either by selecting the release you are on and manually searching if you know what you want already.  Very useful if you need something specific like a python debugger and want to see what applications Canonical allows in their repositories.  There's also the option of adding in extra repositories for access to other programs.  When using Fedora this was actually encouraged, as the RPM Fusion community repository contains a large amount of third-party applications that aren't in the main Fedora one.

Day 5 goes through some quality of life techniques to using the command line, the biggest one for me is tab to autocomplete a word you start typing.  Very quick way to get lines written or to autocomplete a ridiculously long Docker Container ID if you need to get into the folder for something.

Day 6 covers using vim as an editor, and it's something I covered abit before when first starting the posts about Python.  To bring something new on the subject, I am gonna bring up what I've been doing recently to brush up on vim which is a program called vimtutor.  It's a program that to my knowledge comes already included into the distro if it has vim(which most do nowadays by default) and it's essentially a large text document with instructions on how to navigate and use the various vim commands.

Each lesson as you can see above teaches you how to do things in vim, as it's not your standard editor with it's reliance on the different modes + keyboard shortcuts.  Lesson 1.2 early on even teaches what is probably the most googled thing about vi/vim which is "how do you exit vim?" so people can finally leave it!  Best thing is this is repeatable, so working through this once a day has helped me greatly in getting vim down more than just trying to write beginner Python programs in it has.  Definitely look into if you are thinking about starting to use vim.

Github repo pages for these days challenges; Day 4 Day 5 Day 6