Find and use a good text editor
If you only occasionally write scripts or programs then vi is probably good enough for you. However, if you get into some real in depth programming, be it in Bash, C, Java, or some other language you should very definitely check out some of the other text editors that are available on Linux. You will almost certainly become more productive.
As I mentioned before, I have been working with computers for a really long time. I started out using an editor on DOS called Edlin and it was pretty weak (but still better than punch cards). I eventually moved on and started using vi on AIX (IBM's version of UNIX). I got pretty good at using vi since we didn't have any other options yet. As time went on other choices became available and I started using the IBM Personal Editors. These were really easy to use, more efficient than vi, and had many more features. As I did more and more programming, I found that none of these editors could do everything I wanted and so I wrote...