VI or VIM cheat sheet

Moving to a Unix system is a lot easier than it use to be but learning all the terminal commands can be daunting. There are awesome cheat sheets to help new users remember the system commands, but few for learning the specific text based programs.

I am a big fan of the VI text editor. It's fast, customizable and available on pretty much all Unix/Linux machines. Over the years, I'm relied on VI for most of my text editing work but I've always thought I was just scratching the surface of VI with respect to all the functionality it ships with. Furthermore, most of the vi cheat sheets are multipaged, complex and hard to understand and master.

Last weekend, I decided to spend some time looking through all the VI commands and then compiling a single-page cheat sheet with commands I thought was essential. My hope is this will help me use more of the VI functionality, which I have already accomplished by creating the cheat sheet.

I modeled the VI cheat sheet after Fosswire.com's awesome Linux cheat sheet and hope new and existing users of VI will find it useful. Please let me know if you find any errors.

Special keys keybindings on a Thinkpad running Xubuntu 14.04

IBM Thinkpads came with tons of extra buttons affectionately knows as special keys. See here for a full list of the keys and the actions they triggers. All the keys work out of the box except for the Access IBM next to the Esc key and the Previous and Next Page keys on either side of the up arrow key.

For as long as I can remember I've key those keys to do the following.

Pushing the Access IBM key launches my terminal. I'm always in the terminal, so this is convenient and easy.

Pushing the Previous Page key moves to the workspace on the left, while the Next Page key moves to the workspace on the right. I work with many applications at a time with lots of opened windows, so having multiple workspaces and an easy way to access them makes life much easier.

IBM T42p RAM upgrade and new (used) 9-cell battery

My IBM T42p came with 1.5 GB of RAM--a 500 MB stick in the slot under the keyboard and a 1 GB stick in the slot on the back of the machine. Don't get me wrong, 1.5 GB of RAM is not bad, especially  using Xubuntu. However, the machine can address a maximum of 2 GB, so I wanted to max it out.

I had an old 1 GB stick around the house from the old PC2700 DDR days, so I removed the keyboard and replaced the 500 MB stick with the 1 GB stick. See instructions for removing the keyboard below.

My Thinkpad came with a pretty crappy battery that lasted a cool 30 minutes. This meant, I was pretty much tethered to my outlet with the AC adaptor. I wanted a better battery, so I went to eBay. I bought a SANYO replacement (not genuine IBM/Lenovo) that was dead on arrival (DOA), but the seller gave me a refund. With the refund, I then bought a genuine--but used--IBM/Lenovo 9-cell battery that was guaranteed to last at least 3 hours.

DOA SANYO replacement battery

I'll update this blog post when I receive my new (old) battery.

UPDATE:

The 9-cell battery I purchased on eBay arrived today and it looks like a great purchase.

New 9-cell battery

It's been through only 3 charge cycles, and retains 96% of the designed charge capacity. With this capacity I should get between 3.5---4 hours of battery life between charges. See the tlp stats below.

My new 9-cell battery is awesome

My New (Old) Thinkpad has arrived

I'm a big Thinkpad fanatic--have always been. Recently, I saw an old IBM T42p on eBay for $80 and immediately purchased it. I thought it was a good deal considering that it originally cost almost 3 grand in 2005. I have a late 2011 15" MacBook Pro that I used for work and when I need lots of computing power, but I love playing around with the Thinkpad for everything else

The laptop has a large and bright 14.1" screen with 1400x1050 resolution. It has a 1.8GHz processor and came with a 1.5 GB of RAM and a 60GB Hitachi HD.

It came with Windows XP SP3 installed and not much else. Since, XP is no longer support I've decided to run Xubuntu 14.04 LTS, which is supported until 2017. I opted for Xubuntu because of its resource friendly and works great on older machines.

This blog serves two purposes:

1. A place for me to keep a record of everything I did to the system. This is essential because I know I will break the system in the future because I'm always messing around with configuration files and installing unstable applications from untrusted sources.
2. I decided to keep a blog so that others trying to run linux on old Thinkpads can learn from my experience and avoid spending hours in forums looking for solutions to problems that I've already encountered and solved.

If anyone has any questions or advise, please contact me by leaving a comment.