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Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

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Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#81

(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

#82
post #70
post #7

The most viewed question is even more relatable: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/927358/how-to-undo-last-... You can get the top viewed questions here: http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/53109/ques...

My own personal top hit is: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2003505/how-do-i-delete-... Pretty sure I've got the command down by now, but it's embarassing how many times I forgot the exact syntax. It was especially bad before the "--delete" syntax was introduced.

TIL --delete, I still `git push origin :branchname`'d just this morning.

Though at least now github provides easily access buttons.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#83

I'm somewhat amazed but mostly amused that the Vim developers care so little about user experience that they continue to ignore that people have trouble with exiting their tool and refuse to adapt to a more expected convention for exiting it.

The Neovim fork takes UX seriously and have changed many of the defaults with this in mind.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#85
post #55
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Cute, but no. When you enter insert mode, the "welcome screen" disappears. So if you can see the instruction telling you to type ':quit', then typing :quit will work.

FTA, https://zgab33vy595fw5zq-zippykid.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/...

It happens because people don't what they are doing. You assume that they hit ctrl+c, then immediately type :quit, but if they did, then they wouldn't be Googling it. They did something between trying to exit and quit that got them into a different mode.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#86

I'm somewhat amazed but mostly amused that the Vim developers care so little about user experience that they continue to ignore that people have trouble with exiting their tool and refuse to adapt to a more expected convention for exiting it.

Bingo.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#87
post #7

The most viewed question is even more relatable: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/927358/how-to-undo-last-... You can get the top viewed questions here: http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/53109/ques...

hey Linus, undo last 1 git command (as though it had never been entered): git undo 1 thanks.

I'll bet between the reflog and aliases you could do that.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#88

I'm somewhat amazed but mostly amused that the Vim developers care so little about user experience that they continue to ignore that people have trouble with exiting their tool and refuse to adapt to a more expected convention for exiting it.

What about everyone who's been using it for decades and expects it to work that way?

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#89
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Control C.

What interactive terminal programs exit using ^C? Nano doesn't, top doesn't. There is no standard for interactive terminal programs. Furthermore ^C doesn't fit with the rest of vim's control schema, so you wouldn't really be doing anybody any favors in the long run.

Funnily enough, emacs doesn't either.

Re: Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim

#90

(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…

I find that with a specific and known edit, it's far easier to do using sed and awk. In particular awk Has better power-to-weight ratio at traditional text processing. I think typical awk scripts could very well be shorter than the equivalent python scripts that do the same thing.
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