Using Conky as a VIM Cheat Sheet

To become a Vi ninja we need to make sure we have the commands at our finger tips until they become second nature. There are a variety of ways to do this, but in this article I'm going to discusss using Conky as a tool to remember Vi commands. 

First we need to open up the conky config file to edit it. You can use any text editor to do this since it's assumed you're not very good with Vi yet. In this case I'll use geany as a text editor.

k0ncepts@crunchbang:~$ geany /etc/skel/.conkyrc 

I am using Crunch Bang(#!) for this article and #! has a pre configured conky script that I'm just going to edit. In #! you can get to the .conkyrc by right clicking on your Openbox desktop environment > settings > conky > .conkyrc; or geany /etc/skel/.conkyrc. If you're not running #! and want to find out where .conkyrc is located you can use find ~/ -iname .conkyrc. 

 From here we can add our Vi/VIM cheat sheet for example:

VIM Cheat Sheet

${hr}

Inserting Text

${hr}

a:$alignr Append text after cursor

A:$alignr Append text at the end of the line

i:$alignr Insert text before the cursor

I:$alignr Insert text before the curosr 

After you're comfortable with the cheat sheet you've made save .conkyrc, and restart conky. This can be accomplished a couple of ways depending on your distro. I'm just going to show you how to via the cli.

k0ncepts@crunchbang:~$ killall -SIGUSR1 conky

You should now have a nice little cheat sheet to help you become a Vi/VIM ninja! These same concepts can be used for any information you might want at the tip of your finger tips.

Resources:

VIM tutorial

Setting Conky up on Ubuntu
VIM commands