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

[metahacker]

At undergrad, the computer accounts were all on *nix machines. (Suns, specifically.) So if you wanted to use your account, you had to learn how to use *nix and elm. Luckily I had a dad who had taught me that stuff.

But they also set the default editor to vi. So you'd end up writing an email, and then get stuck in the never-can-quit loop, and/or get emails with "wq! :q wqZZ!" at the end.

If you were really bad, say, by leaving yourself logged in, the BOFHs would also edit your .login file to include the helpful command "logout", which was...hard to fix. Or it would have been, but this was the stone age, and everyone's accounts were +rwx by default. So you just had to find someone else to edit your file...who also knew how to quit vi...

Despite this, vi(m) is still my editor of choice.

[cellio]

Our undergrad machines ran TOPS-20. Most of the terminals in the computer room (man, I'm dating myself here...) were lineprinters, but there were a few VT100s or similar. In the intro CS class they had us use a line editor, which probably wasn't really SOS (Son Of Stopgap) but felt kinda like it was. You edited files by...typing the line number of the line you wanted to change (which you'd previously gotten from a listing) and then either retyping it or maybe there was some cursor control so you could make finer edits. I don't remember any more.

So one day, maybe halfway through the class, I saw my TA using one of the VT100s and she was using a different editor. I saw no line numbers at all, and she was moving a cursor around and she could see more context and it just looked much better. So I said "gimme". She explained that this editor was harder and, also, most of the terminals couldn't support it (not being video terminals). I said "I don't care -- gimme". She told me maybe a dozen emacs commands, I found a cheat sheet somewhere, and off I went.

By the time I got access to my first Unix machine (BSD), where emacs was the norm at my school, I was already comfortable in the editor. That just left learning a new shell, so that wasn't bad.

[mdlbear]

Hey! Someone else who remembers SOS. I named it, after adding regex-based ranges and a couple of other things to Stopgap.

[madfilkentist]

I remember running into SOS somewhere in my career, though I can't recall the circumstances. It was probably before I knew you.

[mdlbear]

It was, as far as I can remember, a straightforward port of SOS. It was originally written for the PDP-10 at the Stanford AI Lab, but since the 20 had the same architecture DEC was able to use it pretty much as-is. They may have had to translate from Stanford's assembler to their own; not sure how different they may have been.

[cellio]

Oh cool; I didn't know that I knew someone who worked on that.

I don't actually know if it was SOS; I hadn't heard of either it or Stopgap at the time, only later. What I remember of it matched what I later heard of SOS. But it was my first editor, not counting writing BASIC on paper tape, so I didn't have any context yet.

[goljerp]

Ah, good old days. I first cut my teeth on a DEC PDP-11. We had a bunch of VT220s, some VT100s, and a lonely VT52 in a corner. And a couple of lineprinters, but I don't think they really wanted kids logging into 'em, in general. So I learned EDT. Which actually served me fairly well, as I did a bunch of my dissertation in an updated version of that (on a Decstation). But in the vi(m) / Emacs wars, I tend to firmly come down on the side of: pico. (nano?) I'm not a sysadmin; if I need to do anything more complex than just "cat >> test.txt" in a terminal, I want something simple which has the commands I need clearly labeled on the bottom.