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

[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.