for the techies: exiting vim

[cellio]

I once heard a quip that went something like this:

"I used vi for a couple years."
"Yeah, I couldn't figure out how to exit, either."

I admit that the first time I was unwittingly thrown into the vi editor (predecessor to vim), I had to kill the process from another terminal (yes, terminal). So I was amused to see this blog post today: Stack Overflow: Helping One Million Developers Exit Vim.

In the last year, How to exit the Vim editor has made up about .005% of question traffic: that is, one out of every 20,000 visits to Stack Overflow questions. That means during peak traffic hours on weekdays, there are about 80 people per hour that need help getting out of Vim.

The point of the post isn't actually to bash vim, though it humorously acknowledges the widespread problem (and c'mon, you have to do it a little). Mostly they analyze data about who is presumably getting stuck in vim, complete with charts and stuff. Enjoy.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

Yesterday I used vi for the first time in quite a while. A potential customer wants me to submit articles in HTML, and that's the easiest way to write it on my Ubuntu laptop.

[cellio]

If you need help installing emacs, just say so. :-)

(I write my HTML in text editors, too.)

[madfilkentist]

Installing emacs is easy. It's getting it to do what I want to do instead of what it wants to do that's the problem.

[cellio]

Yeah, that (Usenet) news reader I wrote in emacs back in the day wasn't very good. :-) (But, more seriously, yes emacs has arcana too. No argument there. Emacs happens to be the editor whose arcana I learned first, is all.)

[mdlbear]

I learned emacs after vi (can't say second, since I'd used a dozen or so different editors by then). Only took me a week or two to completely forget vi.

[jducoeur]

I found that, when I stopped thinking of Emacs as an editor and starting thinking of it as a highly-opinionated operating system, it generally made more sense.

(I was a *hardcore* Emacs hacker back in the day: I wrote what might have been the first major mode for Ada, as part of writing the original Ada '95 IDE. Fun stuff, but you have to love LISP...)

[cellio]

I found that, when I stopped thinking of Emacs as an editor and starting thinking of it as a highly-opinionated operating system, it generally made more sense.

Yes. When I started working in the CS department and thus gained access to the Unix machines, I learned (from the others there) to just live in emacs, which wasn't just for editing files but also for running a shell, reading email, monitoring the Coke machine, and suchlike.

but you have to love LISP...

But of course. :-)

[(Anonymous)]

Might be even faster to write the first draft in MarkDown and convert it before tackling anything fancy.