61–70 of 318 posts
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to be fair thats not enough either. someone might accidentally have pressed 'a' , and now good luck understanding how to get out of it without having a crash course on vim
Yeah, whenever I run some program, I just press a random key like "a" to get started. ;)
Generally I think engineers need to fight the temptation to show off the importance and complexity of their software by spitting out all the unnecessary details and logs.
This is a part of the unix philosphy I often forget, but agree with just as much as the rest. As an example: I love curl for piping the data to stdout per default, but I'm frequently annoyed by the progress bars I didn't ask for, especially if a script involves multiple curl commands.
Seconded. Though curl isn't the worst offender in that regard. Anything that touches TeX drives me nuts with its blatant disregard for this rule. Not only does every TeX engine spew pages of output while processing even the simplest documents, but there is no way to turn it off. (It's hardly the only way in which TeX makes my blood boil, but it's the most visible one.) FFmpeg is also quite bad here, but at least you…
They could at least link to tAoUP[1].
[1] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html
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> Note that the "rule of silence" (combined with the habit of writing documentation like longform essays) is also one factor that makes unix-like systems newbie-unfriendly. (Famous example: trying to exit vi) $ man foo *scroll to the end with the EXAMPLES section* There should be an option for that. man --take-me-to-the-examples foo
You might find this intersting: https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr
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> Famous example: trying to exit vi To be fair, this has been fixed a long time ago. At least Vim (which is the Vi installed on most systems) shows the following message on startup: ~ VIM - Vi IMproved ~ ~ version 7.4.1829 ~ by Bram Moolenaar et al. ~ [...] ~ Vim is open source and freely distributable ~ ~ Help poor children in Uganda! ~ type :help iccf for information ~ ~ type :q to exit ~ type :help or for on-line…
Someone unfamiliar might just be dumped into vi because some other program thought it'd be great to open a text editor, e.g. for a commit message. You're unlikely to run vi intentionally unless you also know you want to run vi and how to exit, I guess.
Also, if you ^C in Vi, you get the message:
Type :quit to exit VimIt's often a stupid rule. If you have a process that is stuck, you type "kill " to kill it. But kill doesn't tell you if the process was killed or not, so you have to double-check with "ps " to see if it is still alive. If it is, you try again with "kill -9 ". I suspect the reason is that for most signals, kill can't determine if the signal was acted upon or not. But for KILL and TERM it could wait a few milliseconds…
you already have a tool to check whether processes exist... 'ps'. This is the essence of 'small, single purpose programs that work well with each other' rule.
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> Famous example: trying to exit vi To be fair, this has been fixed a long time ago. At least Vim (which is the Vi installed on most systems) shows the following message on startup: ~ VIM - Vi IMproved ~ ~ version 7.4.1829 ~ by Bram Moolenaar et al. ~ [...] ~ Vim is open source and freely distributable ~ ~ Help poor children in Uganda! ~ type :help iccf for information ~ ~ type :q to exit ~ type :help or for on-line…
Someone unfamiliar might just be dumped into vi because some other program thought it'd be great to open a text editor, e.g. for a commit message. You're unlikely to run vi intentionally unless you also know you want to run vi and how to exit, I guess.