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Stack Overflow: Helping One Million Developers Exit Vim (2017)

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Re: Stack Overflow: Helping One Million Developers Exit Vim (2017)

#31

Post by tim333 »

thosakwe wrote: post #13

Hot take: Vim should include a simple “Type :qa! to quit” line in its startup message. Something makes me think it would clear up a lot of confusion for first time users. EDIT: I notice now that it has a “Type :q to exit.” I never noticed that before, and I use Vim most days, so I can see how others might miss it too.

I notice on the macbook if I type vi or vim in the console I do get a " type :q to exit "

However I usually got thrown into it from a 'git commit' which I don't thing has any such help.

Re: Stack Overflow: Helping One Million Developers Exit Vim (2017)

#32

Post by dustinmoris »

> China, Korea and...

> That might indicate that when developers in these countries enter Vim, they usually meant to do so, and they know how to get out of it.

Or it might mean that in China and the Republic of Korea people don't use StackOverflow as much as people in other countries for whatever reason (they have their own version, censorship, low page rank in their own search engines, etc.)

Re: Stack Overflow: Helping One Million Developers Exit Vim (2017)

#33

Post by tyingq »

Datenstrom wrote: post #21

Whenever I end up on another computer without my environment setup and end up in nano because it is the default, it always takes me a while. There is the cheat sheet at the bottom but as soon as the text appears I'll start manipulating it using vim keybindings and delete things and whatever else randomly. I always assume my fingers were not on the homerow correctly or something first. It is very disorienting. So I im…

This usually happens to me on a fresh install the first time I run "crontab -e" or a git commit.

Re: Stack Overflow: Helping One Million Developers Exit Vim (2017)

#34

Post by Mugwort »

How is this even possible? I used EMACS for years and had no trouble understanding Vim. Who's hiring these developers who can't even exit Vim? Is this even a real story or the Onion?!? OK, it's real. I need to go outside and get some fresh air. This is simply too shocking.

Re: Stack Overflow: Helping One Million Developers Exit Vim (2017)

#35

Post by ajross »

genbit wrote: post #28

first stuck in vim 13 years ago. No internet, no GUI, could not speak english, 1 book on unix/linux. So I had to reboot (hard reboot) computer, three times, then re-install OS, since something broke because of hard-forced reboot.

Hah. First stuck in emacs ~26 years ago, on a dumb terminal (want to say VT-102, maybe the VT-220's that were in the adjoining room). Tried everything to get out of it with no success, was too embarassed to ask for help, and eventually just power cycled the thing and walked away sheepishly.

Don't believe I ever got stuck in vi. All the cool kids were emacs users and it was years before I bothered to learn it.

Re: Stack Overflow: Helping One Million Developers Exit Vim (2017)

#36

Post by waynecochran »

My first year of grad school I was a TA for a first year computer science course that was often taken by students from a variety of majors. The first editing sessions I spent the whole lab time running around help students with frozen vi editors.

The main problem is you don't start in "edit mode" and students expect to be able to just start typing (which is a reasonable expectation). Who knows what "command" they just invoked -- sometimes I just "ctrl-z, killall vi"

I learned to hate vi.

Re: Stack Overflow: Helping One Million Developers Exit Vim (2017)

#38

Post by faitswulff »

Mugwort wrote: post #34

How is this even possible? I used EMACS for years and had no trouble understanding Vim. Who's hiring these developers who can't even exit Vim? Is this even a real story or the Onion?!? OK, it's real. I need to go outside and get some fresh air. This is simply too shocking.

> I used EMACS for years

Probably not a great representative sample

Re: Stack Overflow: Helping One Million Developers Exit Vim (2017)

#39

Post by SeanLuke »

torgny wrote: post #10

Why is this such an issue? It is no harder exiting vim than it is exiting plain old vi, nvi or any other vi clone. In fact, the very same keystrokes that you use for exiting vi can be used in vim as well.

or ed!

Wait, I don't think I'm helping your case.

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