Get to know David Arceneaux, a developer living in the command line, and also in Orange County, in today’s speaker interview.

What should we know about you that you haven’t included in your brief, third-person, professional biography?

I’ve been in school for a Very Long Time, ended up with a couple of Master’s degrees, then worked a series of odd jobs, ranging from managing a pizza place to being a PHP developer for WordPress sites.

What’s the most powerful command line shortcut most developers don’t know about? (Think “cmd + z” for nerds.)

The most powerful command line shortcut isn’t so much a single command, but a mode, Vi Mode. I grew up using the Vi editor, then learned about how to turn on Vi mode for the shell (there’s also Emacs mode). This lets me use the familiar hand memory I use in editing source code to also let me edit a command line expression, because I often find myself writing out similar command lines for what I work with.

Imagine you’re allowed to link to or briefly pitch something, what do imagine?

I’d love to establish something like the old AT&T Bell Labs. An open-ended, no pressure playground for researchers and developers to collaborate together on things that don’t represent themselves very well on balance sheets, but which history has shown us, end up being the foundation of the future. Think of UNIX and everything that sprang forth from it: it started off as a side project by someone who wanted to play a video game he wrote on another computer.

For the rest of your career you only have one text editor or IDE, which do you choose and why? BONUS: What editor theme do you choose?

For the text editor, I’ll go with what I’ve been using for more than half my life (in one form or another): Vi, this time around as NeoVim. The color scheme I love and use is Tim Pope’s Vivid Chalk: https://github.com/tpope/vim-vividchalk

As an individual living in the command line, what’s one of your command line “aha” moments that a command line newbie would find useful?

The one great epiphany I had is related to what I’ve mentioned earlier: vi mode for the command line.

Make sure to catch David’s presentation at WordCamp Los Angeles 2016 entitled Leveling up in WordPress development, a workshop on command line tools.