Oh goodness, I'm typing in vim. What has even happened?

I've been playing in the shell and falling in love with it is what!

The experience of learning some command line basics is just a blast, though admittely is a bit of a learning curve. I credit [Russ][1] for getting me interested in learning any of it in the first place. My journey there basically started when I asked him for help with my computer, because he was the only friend that I knew knew more about computers than I did.

I was running windows 10 at the time, and it was being generally buggy. He took one look and said, "I haven't used a windows machine in years, I'd be totally willing to tech support you if you were running any debian based linux distro, but I can't help with this." As I realized that while I'd been using windows computers for years, I didn't really know that much about them, I didn't have anyone else I could bum tech support from, and I am always down to try something new, I asked whether he could help me back up my data and switch to linux.

As so many before me, that began a rabbit hole. Russ had a tendancy initially to tell me to use the gui for things, get frustrated when it took forever and/or behaved in a way he wasn't expecting, and make me pop open a terminal and as far as I could tell, do hacker-y magic to get my computer to behave, occasionally clarifying what he wanted to install or do and then asking me to type my password.

This left me not at all inclined to continue doing things as I had, I have always wanted to do that sort of geekery and never had anyone to show me how. So I started being very annoying, asking lots of questions, and continually getting terminology wrong.

I still do, but I make more of a habit of websearching what I'm trying to do and finding terms he'll understand rather than talking around a problem for ages lol.

I left it having learned some of the very basics, starting to read [Learning the Shell][2] and then completely forgetting about playing on my computer ever, because life got busy and I could do most of what I needed to do on my phone.

Recently, however, I changed jobs and am now spending a lot of time at a desk on my laptop. So I've been trying to optimize my workflow. I've gotten back into reading tutorials, got an account on tilde.town, which I discovered in my search for where to host this blog, which I built using Hugo, using Nano to write the inital content, but have since really enjoyed exploring. In fact, I have a ssh session open so I can chat with people there on weechat in the tmux pane to the left of where I'm editing this. Russ found Over the Wire's [Wargames][3] and pointed me at it as a good way to learn some useful tools. I've really enjoyed playing through a few levels, and intend to do more soon.

If anyone who happens to read this has quesions, please ask. I'd love the opportunity to explain how to do any of the things I've been poking at, because if there's anything I know, it's that trying to teach a thing will point out what you don't know yet about it faster than just about anything else.

I'm off to go save this darn thing, then either join in for movie night in tilde town, or bust through a few more levels of the bandit wargame, or who knows? Maybe both!

[1]: https://mastodon.art/@RussSharek
[2]: http://www.linuxcommand.org/lc3_lts0010.php
[3]: http://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/bandit0.html