Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim • Hacker News Board

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#91

Post by binarycrusader » Tue, May 23, 2017, 6:05 PM UTC

dsp1234 wrote: post #29

vopi wrote: 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.

dev: That just typed ':q' into the text area me: Hit escape first, then :q dev: Oh, then why doesn't say escape then :q me: welp

Except, if you hit Ctrl+C, you don't have to hit ESC. You literally type what it tells you and it works.

The only way the above would work as suggested is if the person hit an insert mode key first after having typed Ctrl+C.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#92

Post by FreeFull » Tue, May 23, 2017, 6:05 PM UTC

bandrami wrote: post #66

(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…

Also keep in mind that ex is a part of vi and vim, and is an improved version of ed. All : commands in vi(m) are actually ex commands

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#93

Post by masklinn » Tue, May 23, 2017, 6:05 PM UTC

tcoff91 wrote: post #18

ZenoArrow wrote: post #10

I barely use any Vim, but I'm more confused about there being some hidden complexity in exiting Vim that I'm not aware of. Isn't it just... [Esc] :wq ...or... [Esc] :q! ...depending if you want to save the current document or not?

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.

> If you try to -c, the program even tells you to use :q

And then you do and it helpfully adds ":q" to the buffer.

You're still in vim.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#94

Post by amelius » Tue, May 23, 2017, 6:05 PM UTC

And this is what it looks like: [1] :)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdcPZc21agk

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#95

Post by Macha » Tue, May 23, 2017, 6:05 PM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #71

signal11 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So it actually doesn't, it's basically just a hack around the fact that the repl is basically:

    while True:
        print(str(eval(input())))

Case in point:

    >>> x = str(quit)
    >>> x
    'Use quit() or Ctrl-Z plus Return to exit'

I suppose you could implement quit.__str__ as sys.exit(0), if you really wanted to avoid this problem.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#96

Post by dschuetz » Tue, May 23, 2017, 6:05 PM UTC

There are two kinds of people - those who were able to exit vim, and those who stuck in it.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#97

Post by Crito » Tue, May 23, 2017, 6:05 PM UTC

smacktoward wrote: post #67

lucideer wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is a common convention, though, which is: don't use modal interfaces, modal interfaces are bad. The problem vim has is that its UI is entirely organized around modes, which makes the "people are terrible at using modal interfaces" problem a hard one for it to cope with.

If you took the modal interface away from vim, you wouldn't have vim anymore. If you don't want a modal interface, don't use vim.

You may as well expect Porsche to move the 911's engine to the front.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#98

Post by fishywang » Tue, May 23, 2017, 6:06 PM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #74

a3n wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm pretty sure that I've never seen any OS/Linux distribution set default EDITOR to vim. If EDITOR is set to vim, then someone must intentionally did that.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#99

Post by Kurtz79 » Tue, May 23, 2017, 6:06 PM UTC

smacktoward wrote: post #67

lucideer wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is a common convention, though, which is: don't use modal interfaces, modal interfaces are bad. The problem vim has is that its UI is entirely organized around modes, which makes the "people are terrible at using modal interfaces" problem a hard one for it to cope with.

Its use of a modal interface is one of the main reasons that, to this day, attract many developers to VIM.

People "terrible at using modal interfaces" should just use another editor.

The problem might lie in other applications indirectly launching VIM, taking for granted the users' familiarity with it.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#100

Post by heeen2 » Tue, May 23, 2017, 6:07 PM UTC

> It looks like developers in Ukraine, Turkey and Indonesia are getting stuck in Vim quite a bit: it makes up a larger portion of their Vim questions than in any other country. In contrast, in China, Korea and Japan the fraction going to this question is a tenth smaller.

From my experience, people at least from Korea are very likely to develop on windows, even when targeting linux or even embedded linux.

You can tell from the msdos line endings and comments in Korean that are in a weird multi byte encoding that I could not make vim display correctly. I think they use some sort of sftp synchronization tool like WinSCP when you edit a file remotely.

I read that Windows is really deeply rooted in their IT culture, so much so that banking sites are required to use a special encryption scheme implemented in ActiveX. I can see why that would discourage people to use a different OS for their daily needs, let alone convince corporate IT to support dual boot.