16 Aug
2011
16 Aug
'11
10:58 p.m.
Excerpts from Fons Adriaensen's message of 2011-08-16 20:45:47 +0200:
It seems some people stumble upon it by accident, more or less. Just met
one on saturday. It went something like this: "what do you study?"
"computing science" "Linux user?" "Yep" *imagine funky face*
"Tried to
use vi or something once for some fluid dynamics thing, we used [bla]
instead".
Just a single case and no idea how exactly he stumbled upon it, but it
was obvious that he a) associated Linux with vi(m) and b) was put off
fast by vi(m). I doubt a nicer introduction could have helped in this
case though, simply because vi(m) is a really complex beast and you
either invest time to learn what you need to learn about it or you can't
use it. There's no way around investing time with this thing.
On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 09:57:51PM +0200, Emanuel
Rumpf wrote:
vim comes up with a help screen if you run it just call 'vim'. If you
follow the instructions you get to the manual where one of the first
instructions tell the user how to quit.
What about starting with a simple message:
"Welcome to vi, a text-e cditor , Press ESC : q to quit, Press ESC :
h for help. "
I'd be surprised if vi(m) couldn't be configured to do this. Do you notice,
how much this changes the user experience ?? Almost
effortlessly !
It just delays the problem by a few seconds. You can't use vi without
understanding its different modes etc.
And anyway, vi is not the kind of program you discover accidentally by
clicking around. It's to a sysadmin or hacker what using a screwdriver
or maybe a soldering iron is to someone meddling with electronics - part
of the essential background. You use it because you need it. There are
lots of 'cheat sheets' around, and there's 'man vi' of course.
Ciao,