March 19th, 2021: What did you learn this week?

#weeklylearn #discuss #weeklyretro

It's that time of the week again. So wonderful devs, what did you learn this week? It could be programming tips, career advice etc.

![Yoda wooping someone's butt](https://media.giphy.com/media/yDYAHbqe5DfyM/giphy.gif)

Feel free to comment with what you learnt and/or reference your TIL post to give it some more exposure.

#todayilearned

Summarize a concept that is new to you.

And remember, if something you learnt was a big win for you, then you know where to drop it as well.👇👇🏻👇🏼👇🏽👇🏾👇🏿

Gracie Gregory (she/her) for The DEV Team

Mar 19 '21

What was your win this week?

#discuss #weeklyretro

1 min read

![Little kid making a fist as if to say "Yes!"](https://media.giphy.com/media/6brH8dM3zeMyA/giphy.gif)

Top comments (17)

Heiker • Mar 19 '21 • Edited

Ooh. This one was interesting. This is a two part story.

1) So, zsh has a "vi-mode" built-in, and it turn out is not as useful in practice.

2) The bindkey command has an option -s that lets you map two key sequence.

Say I want to have a keymap, ctrl+x + s, to make zsh type sudo for me. This is how it goes.

bindkey -s '^xs' 'sudo'

The ^ thingy, means ctrl. That would work. But it can be better, because you can have the "special" sequence in the other side too. We can get fancy.

bindkey -s '^xs' '^asudo ^e'

^a means ctrl+a, so that would get you to the beginning of the line and type sudo for you. Then, ^e will get your cursor to the end of the line. I would say that works fine 95% of the time. The other 5%, is when the original position of the cursor wasn't the end of the line. Can we do better? Yes, remember the "vi-mode"? That works too.

Behold.

bindkey -s '^xs' '#^asudo ^x^vf#xi'

#: Its literally #, nothing special here.
^a: Go to the beginning of the line
sudo: You know it already.
^x^v: Enter vi-cmd mode. That is ctrl+x + ctrl+v. Not the most intuitive thing in the world.
f#: Remember, we are in "vi-mode." In here the character f is a command, a search command. What does it search? The next character we type. So, this will search for a # and get the cursor to that position.
x: Deletes the character under the cursor, which should be #.
i: Get us back to insert mode.

And there you have it. Now you can use ctrl+x + s to add sudo to a command you're currently writing, and it will take you back to the place you started (that is of course if you don't any extra # in your command already).

While on the subject of crazy keybindings I present these.

bindkey -s '^xf' '#^e | fzf^x^vF#xi'
bindkey -s '^xp' '#^e | less^x^vF#xi'

You can guess what they do.

EDIT: By the way, fish users already have something like these. I believe Alt+p will add | less to your command. Don't remember what others they have.