Can someone :help me?

> That's great for veterans, but actively hostile to newbies.

I would have to respectfully disagree. With the copious amounts of man-pages, the availability of vim-tutor (for this particular case), and all other avenues of help available within most Unix tools, I cannot agree with the notion that software (vim, in particular) is actively hostile. Compared to the copious amounts of software that is far less documented, and far less robust than the standard Unix set of tools, I think calling the command line hostile is at best downright laziness.

Please don't call something hostile if you've barely given it a chance. Not every tool needs to be wrapped in a fully animated tutorial with buttons everywhere. In fact, the more elegant tools often don't have these things and do their best to stay out of your way. Which leads to the next part of your comment:

> You'd think there could be some sort of middle ground.

Why would there be? Any middle ground would risk upsetting two groups: the power users that want the tool to stay out of the way and do what it's meant to do, and the group of newbies (or regular users) that can't figure out what the tool was designed for or the best way to use it. The regular users wouldn't be satisfied with the help available for any middle-ground tool, and power users would just find that the half-baked tutorials, help system, or user support just got in the way. This would cause a rift in the community, which would force some users to search for a replacement that gives better help, while the power users would drift to a similar tool with the cruft and bell and whistles removed.

If you're just a regular user, and you end up using a tool like Notepad++ or Nano or some other editor instead of Vim or Emacs, and you can't for the life of you figure out vim or emacs, that is completely fine. Continue using the tool you are capable of wielding. However, that's not to say that vim or emacs don't have their own documentation and help systems, it's just that they're not served to the user in the same way. It may not be directly obvious when switching between systems (example: standard help documentation in Windows is nothing like using man or info pages), but I would reckon that it is only immediately non-obvious because you're already used to another way of searching for help.

So please stop calling software hostile, and give it a chance. Truly hostile software exists, but I can guarantee you that basic command line utilities are not it.

Well I wrote this partly for a friend who wants to give Vim a try. I noticed if I told him to read the help on a topic, he would just google the question himself (maybe he doesn't like the terminal interface to read the help doc).

I've also noticed some people will manually go search a plugin on Github just to read the plugin's doc folder, when the same help doc is available right inside vim!

So I thought I would help explain why Vim's help is so awesome that people should use it more and using it more means that you learn more things about vim.

But I appreciate that you like my website, thanks! :)

Or remove it...

If there is a software that I use for the first time and it accepts commands my first command is usually "help".

Last time I had to debug a bash script so I found bashdb "from apt-cache search debug bash" and just ran it. I had no problem using the internal help.

Most of the time you don't have to look up things on the Internet and just RTFM.

I suppose one of the advantages of a GUI is that it shows you what options are available; it's kind of inherently "explorable".

There's probably a few factors that confound this. First, a GUI for something as abstract and powerful as VI is difficult to create, and still keep usable. The only way I can really imagine it is a kind of tutorial overlay which presents common options on the screen. Similar problem for the shell, I guess, there are just too many things you can / want to do in there to distill into a GUI.

Second, I suspect that these tools come from an age where people had different expectations, and with those, different ways of looking for help. I guess most *nix people are aware of man-pages, and are pretty efficient at reading it's syntax. Despite it's lack of GUI, VIM tries pretty hard to point you to the help (e.g. on my installation, the help commands are always shown when you start it - I guess this is by default).