So of course, the first thing I want to do (after installing Raspbian and applying updates) was to add some aliases and switch the editor and history search commands.
Changing the editor to vim
Changing the editor to vim was easier, once I knew how.
- Install vim
- update-alternatives
Vim does not come installed by default on a Raspbian. But adding it is easy enough:
sudo apt-get install vimI had found someone that said (when thing weren’t working the way I wanted) to sudo apt-get install vim-full ← this does not work! There is no package “vim-full” from which to install. At least not on my fresh-out-of-the-box Raspbian machine.
sudo update-alternatives --config editorThis opened up a list of available editors, numbered for selection, with an asterisk next to the default. It was set to nano, but I wanted vim.
Except that there were two vim choices: vim.basic and vim.tiny
Which one to choose? Neither looks like vim.full to me. 😉
Turns out I wanted vim.basic
Now, I can be in the less utility, and if I want to edit the file (and I already have permission to do so) I can hit the v key and be editing in vim.
Adding some aliases
This was super easy. I created a file, ~/.bash_aliases and added the alias commands to it.
alias ..='cd ..'
alias ll='ls -l'Changing the history search keystrokes
This one was the closest to what is described in my How to make Ubuntu have a nice bash shell like OpenSuSE post.
sudo vim /etc/inputrc
Find the commented out commands, and uncomment them:
# alternate mappings for "page up" and "page down" to search the history # "\e[5~": history-search-backward # "\e[6~": history-search-forward
All I have to do is to delete the “#” character that declares \e[5~ and \e[6~ to be a comment. With vim, this is the x key