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Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

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Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#71
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> developers are often dropped into Vim from a git command or another situation where they didn’t expect to be, and they run into it infrequently enough to forget how they solved it last time. So the first screen doesn't help in this situation The sort of developers who get stuck in Vim are not the ones who are using it intentionally

Hitting Ctrl+C still works, it tells you to type ":quit ".

Why doesn't it just quit? That's as stupid as Python's

    >>> quit
    Use quit() or Ctrl-D (i.e. EOF) to exit
The software knows perfectly well what I'm trying to do FFS.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#74
post #60
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It literally everytime you boot the first screen tells you how to quit and get help. So..read the screen that comes up Everytime? If you try Ctrl c it tells you it's :q.

vim myfile.txt opens myfile.txt, and literally does not show the splash screen.

And worse vim is often the default EDITOR or software's fallback in case no EDITOR is set, so you get dropped into a vim edition buffer seemingly randomly.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> refuse to adapt to a more expected convention for exiting it. Which would be?

Control C.

What interactive terminal programs exit using ^C? Nano doesn't, top doesn't. There is no standard for interactive terminal programs. Furthermore ^C doesn't fit with the rest of vim's control schema, so you wouldn't really be doing anybody any favors in the long run.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#78
post #3

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

It's quite hard to get emacs to open for you when you don't want it. Harder still to get it without a GUI. Overall, both are about as hard to deal with. Vim has a better help message, but it's still difficult to find.

Yep - I suspect people are less likely to stumble into emacs without any warning.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#80

(Attribution is questionable, but as a geezer I feel the need to make sure the younger generations at least are familiar with this:) ed is the standard text editor Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty ed: golem> ed ? help ? ? ? quit ? exit ? bye ? hello? ? eat flaming death ? ^C ? ^C ? ^D ? --- Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet pruden…

"When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!! Not a “viitor”. Not a “emacsitor”. Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED! ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!"

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.txt

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