Introduction

This was written with a MacOS system in mind.

Useful tricks in an editor (visual studio)

Navigate script using the keyboard	Bash command	Comments
block indent	Tab
block unindent	Shift+Tab
move quickly cursor through lines	Apple+arrow
select text	Shift+arrow
l	then Apple+D to jointly select and modify other instances of the selected text
comment out	Apple+/

Useful tricks in the terminal (bash)

Goal	Bash command	Comments
Export all file names contaning an expression	ls | grep expression > output.txt
Delete all files with a specific extension	find . -name "*.bak" -type f -delete
Interrupt running process	Ctrl+C
*Clears text until beginning of line *	Ctrl+U	useful to delete a chuck of commands directly written in the terminal
*Clears text until beginning *	Ctrl+L	-
Search terminal history	Ctrl+R
Autocomplete command	Tab	Super useful

When using the remote server of your institution to stock data and run computations and clusters, the luxury to create, read, and edit files by clicking with your mouse on a visual interface is no more. Being comfortable using the terminal is a necessity.

Using the terminal for files	Bash command	Comments
create an empty file	touch myfile
edit a file	vim myfile
l	then I for insertion mode
l	maybe / followed by a word to look for
l	then :wq to quit editing mode + save
l	or :q! to quit editing mode + without saving
display file content in terminal	cat myfile
l	or for better display control less myfile
l	or to specifically display parts head myfile tail myfile

That last part is useful when a script is running and updates a log file at each iteration, which you’d like to consult without overwriting it as it is being updated!