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Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

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Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#301

Post by Houshalter »

blhack wrote: post #171

I spent almost 10 years doing IT for a company whose backend was based entirely on as/400. If you've ever used a system like that, I'm sure you know where this is going... The console's that the front-desk or clerical users used every day had a steep learning curve. It was something that you would definitely not be able to walk up to and just intuit. However , once you figured it out, there is never going to be a fas…

I just hate programs that change patterns that are standard everywhere else. E.g. 99% of software uses control+c and control+v to do copy and pasting, so of course software that maps it to something totally different is going to be very frustrating. The same thing with vim using nonstandard way of quitting.

Discoverability is another problem. You can have weird keyboard commands, but make it possible to find them without searching stack overflow. I miss when applications had a big bar at the top of all the commands you could do and their keyboard shortcuts. I'm on chrome right now, and copy and paste is hidden away in a menu. And the keyboard shortcut for it isn't mentioned. How do you think people learned the keyboard shortcut in the first place? Or apple phones have a bunch of gestures that are useful, but no one knows about because you can't discover them.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#302

Post by monknomo »

marvin wrote: post #297
monknomo wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humane programming is something I wish compiler and language builders would do more of

Approximately 50% of the contributors in this thread argue actively against it, so I wouldn't hold my breath ;)

That was not lost on me. They're wrong, and kinda mean TBH, but someday someone will make a pretty good language, with a really helpful compiler/interpreter and will have the viral-fu to get it in use

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#303

Post by misingnoglic »

kazinator wrote: post #213
flavio81 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seriously would like to have a pedalboard with, say, 5 pedals that i could map to specific functions on Emacs. It would be terrific, particularly for Lisp development with SLIME.

Hmm. MIDI foot controller -> USB MIDI interface -> computer -> driver -> user space scriptology ... What do you think? That would easily give you ten pedals. I use a 1993 vintage ART Ultrafoot X-15 I got off Craigslist --- for my guitar rig, not a text editor. :) https://www.google.ca/search?q=ART+Ultrafoot+x-15&tbm=isch

Why not just play the piano for programming?

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#304

Post by Asooka »

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.

Plenty of good reasons for ^C not to quit, mostly having to do with the rest of the Vim interface. Off the top of my head, first ^C is for cancelling actions, second ^C is very close to ^V, which is used for block-select, and very close to ^X, which is used for auto-completion, and very close to ^D, which is page-down, and quitting by mistake would be super frustrating.

I think in this case vi's authors (and by extension vim's author) have picked the right choice of catering to the actual users, rather than being friendly to people who run the editor by mistake. At least they try to tell you "type :quit and press enter to exit".

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#305

Post by drewg123 »

I met my wife because she was stuck in VI. I was a unix sysadmin in the early 90s, and she was a grad student. She came to me for help (like most of the 1st years did) because she couldn't get out of vi. However, to be fair, this was not her fault per-say. She actually knew how to use vi, but just couldn't find the ESC key.

Does anybody remember the DEC keyboards where there was no traditional ESC key, but it was F11? (http://www.cosam.org/images/vt220/keyboard.jpg). Yeah, we used DECstations in the grad labs, and whenever a new grad student asked me a question in the 1st week, I'd answer "F11", and 90% of the time I was right.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#306

Post by cm2187 »

blhack wrote: post #171

I spent almost 10 years doing IT for a company whose backend was based entirely on as/400. If you've ever used a system like that, I'm sure you know where this is going... The console's that the front-desk or clerical users used every day had a steep learning curve. It was something that you would definitely not be able to walk up to and just intuit. However , once you figured it out, there is never going to be a fas…

I think your are mixing steep learning curve with having keyboard shortcuts (whether they are commands or combinations of keys). You can have keyboard based shortcuts with any UI. Actually a UI with no shortcut is probably a bad design in the first place. A steep learning curve just means it is hard to learn, i.e. non intuitive, non discoverable. These are not qualities.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#308

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#310

Post by LoSboccacc »

spathi_fwiffo wrote: post #270
ChuckMcM wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree. And I like that vim doesn't prompt you a lot, but it is the one corner case where such prompting could be useful.

it already tells you hot to quit when you hit control-c and if you happen to be in edit mode, hitting it twice gets you the message. if people don't notice the "Type :quit to exit Vim" message, they also won't see the (Y/N) selection. so, absolutely nothing gained by making this change, except making things more annoying for people who do know how to use vim.

Speaking of which, Control-s is much dangerous to neofites
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