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Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

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Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#41

Post by Crito »

gogopuppygogo wrote: post #8

I'm somewhat amazed but mostly amused that the Vim developers care so little about user experience that they continue to ignore that people have trouble with exiting their tool and refuse to adapt to a more expected convention for exiting it.

Why solve a "problem" that no actual user of the software has? It's not an iphone, it isn't meant for use by the general public.

Use nano if that's what you want. There's no reason to fuck up vim for people who actually use it to help the people who don't.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#42

Post by logicallee »

burkaman wrote: post #7

The most viewed question is even more relatable: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/927358/how-to-undo-last-... You can get the top viewed questions here: http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/53109/ques...

hey Linus, undo last 1 git command (as though it had never been entered):

  git undo 1
thanks.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#43

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

gogopuppygogo wrote: post #8

I'm somewhat amazed but mostly amused that the Vim developers care so little about user experience that they continue to ignore that people have trouble with exiting their tool and refuse to adapt to a more expected convention for exiting it.

One could easily relate this to burkaman's comment in this thread on the most viewed question (how to undo a git commit).

You could say "I'm somewhat amazed but mostly amused that the Git developers care so little about user experience that they continue to ignore that people have trouble with the fact that git command line arguments are an incomprehensible morass of inconsistencies un-righted by overly verbose walls of documentation."

What the two have in common, of course, is that despite being exceptionally beginner-hostile, the tools are massively popular for other reasons. Namely, they are powerful, relatively fast, and they also strongly benefit from cult of personality and network effects.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#44

Post by dsp1234 »

tcoff91 wrote: post #28
gtsteve wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine you don't know that. Now try to exit vim.

Ok, so anyone with any terminal experience but no vim experience would press -c. Then, the program tells them "Type :quit to exit Vim" And if the user is capable of reading, they shouldn't have any problem. If they don't know about ctrl-c, they shouldn't be using a terminal editor.

E37: No write since last change (add ! to override)

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#45

Post by ChuckMcM »

I saw the bumper sticker ":w saves" and thought, to myself I wonder how many people "get" that.

I suggested a long time ago that vi/vim bind ^C to exit. It currently is equivalent to 'esc' (it puts you into command mode if you aren't there and types the message "type :quit to exit Vim". I'd much rather it popped up 'exit vim? y/n?' and the next key would determine if you exited or not.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#47

Post by Crito »

lucideer wrote: post #32
colechristensen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vim has a steep learning curve and making that one thing easier isn't going to make that curve any easier to climb. Powerful tools require documentation and looking up how to quit is the first task of many to use any of vim's power. Not everything has to be easy to use, some things benefit from not being obvious.

I think this is a poor argument. If it's the one singular thing that's frustrating this many users, that's a reason to focus on particular on fixing it somehow. You also need to take into account that most users encountering this problem are not deliberate vim learners: they ended up in vim by accident. That said, as others have pointed out, the vim developers can't really be blamed here as it's just a very hard prob…

>they ended up in vim by accident.

Sounds like a distro problem.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#48

Post by bluedino »

Hah. Back in the old days, when I didn't have a second computer to look up help online, I just powered my Linux PC off if I accidentally got trapped in vim. Later on, I'd just close my PuTTy session.

Then I finally took a little bit of time to learn vim.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#49

Post by Symbiote »

d0mine wrote: post #11
doktrin wrote: post #3

Obviously my personal bias, but it's emacs I can never remember how to exit from.

The command is: M-x kill-emacs (or to save buffers before the exit: M-x save-buffers-kill-emacs). Perhaps, exit-emacs or quit-emacs aliases could be defined.

Control X-C

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#50

Post by tcoff91 »

jayflux wrote: post #33
tcoff91 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it really is that easy. If you try to -c, the program even tells you to use :q It's just become a meme at this point.

But why would i be pressing -c in the first place if i don't know any Vim commands? Edit: ah quit foreground process, ignore me

-c is not a vim command. It's a universal terminal command.

-c is how you kill the foreground process in bash, zsh, sh, windows command line, etc...

If you don't know about -c you shouldn't be attempting to use a terminal based editor to begin with. Vim can't be blamed for people not knowing how to use a terminal.

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