Marc Maron is a comedian and the host of my favourite podcast, WTF with Marc Maron, which is a comedy podcast where Maron interviews not only comedians, but musicians, actors, chefs and artists. His conversations are always engaging, funny, raw and honest. I recommend it especially to those who are pursuing a creative field, as most of his interview subjects have insightful and unique stories about how they became successful. (As you can tell from its title, WTF contains explicit language and is for mature listeners … you’ve been warned!)

Maron’s own success story is worth mentioning. In his 40s, having lived a life of anger, resentment, addiction, failed relationships and burnt bridges, Maron had just gotten fired from a radio gig when he started the WTF podcast as a last, desperate attempt to stay in the comedy game. The podcast not only became incredibly successful, leading to a resurgence in his stand-up career and a television series, but it’s also proven to be his salvation.

I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to do a Maron quote, as I must have listened to hundreds of hours of his voice while working on Zen Pencils. This quote is taken from his latest memoir, Attempting Normal.

RELATED COMICS: Bill Hicks It’s just a ride, Louis C.K. We don’t think about how we talk, George Carlin On assassination (explicit), Henry Rollins Who’s the crazier man?.

- Since my last comic about social media, I think it’s fair to say I’m still totally dependent and addicted to my phone. Who checks their phone as soon as they wake up and while still in bed? I do. Who takes their phone into the toilet with them? Me. It’s gross, but I bet you do it too … don’t lie. Who can’t be alone in public without looking at their phone every five minutes? Yep, me again. While I love social media (it has obviously helped Zen Pencils enormously and it’s incredible how easy I can interact with readers from all over the world), we should also remember some of its negative side effects, as this article points out.
- What are your favourite podcasts? Some of my other recommendations: Hardcore History, The Bugle, The Smartest Man in the World, The Nerdist, Stuff You Should Know, StarTalk Radio and The BS Report.

Deadpool’s gun is bigger than Thicke’s.

[DPiddy]

Using many control keys during the day, such as Ctrl-f to page down in Vim and Ctrl-c to kill a process in terminal, and assigning some of my own to tmux, I’ve began wondering whether all the letters of the alphabet were accounted for. The answer is: yes, they are; plus even some extra characters.

Most key bindings keybindings differ depending on the context, except ones in the “term” column that always keep the same function. The layers that I’m most interested in are:

• the shell (bash/zsh with Emacs key bindings), keybindings), where I edit commands and browse history;
• process control while running a process attached to the terminal;
• Vim, which I use exclusively in the terminal.

I have compiled a comprehensive overview of all control key bindings keybindings in different contexts and highlighted the features that matter to me the most:

backward inc.line; bash: ?? backward inc search

	term	shell prompt	process	Vim normal
C-A		start of line		increment number
C-B		move back a char		page up
C-C			SIGINT
C-D		delete char	send EOF	half page down
C-E		end of line		scroll up
C-F		move forward a char		page down
C-G		abort line		file/position info
C-H	<Bsp>
C-I	<Tab>			jump forward
C-J	<LF>
C-K		kill text to end of line
C-L		clear screen
C-M	<CR>
C-N		next history		move cursor down
C-O		operate-and-get-next		jump back
C-P		previous history		move cursor up
C-Q		zsh: clear
line			C-R				C-R
	redo
C-S		forward inc. search* inc search
C-T		transpose chars	SIGINFO	undo tag jump
C-U		clear line		half page up
C-V		insert next char literally		visual block mode
C-W		delete word		window prefix
C-X		prefix, e.g. C-x,C-e		decrement number
C-Y		yank	(delayed suspend)	scroll down
C-Z			SIGTSTP (suspend)
C-\			SIGQUIT
C-[	<Esc>			exit insert mode
C-]				jump to tag
C-^				alternate buffer

In the shell, these are indispensable:

• C-r – Backward incremental search through history
• C-s – Forward

  incremental search*For incremenatal searchFor

bash, C-s doesn’t work by default. default. Here’s how to enable it:

# Allow <C-s> to pass through to shell and programs stty -ixon -ixoff 

For process control:

• C-z – Suspend a process. Useful for switching away from a man page or Vim while keeping the option to return to it intact.
• fg (shell) – Return a process to foreground
• jobs (shell) – List suspended processes

In Vim:

• C-f/b – Page down/up
• C-a/x – Increment/decrement the number after cursor. Can’t do CSS without it!
• C-] – Jump to tag under cursor
• C-o – Backtrack after having jumped

To learn more about navigating tags and jumps in Vim, see Vim: Revisited.

The brilliant but gone-too-soon Middleman series will return yet again.

Read more...

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