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.

[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.

[herveus]

I maintain that if you claim to be a *nix admin and don't know the basics of vi, you're lying.

[jducoeur]

Yeah, I was very amused by that entry. Another in the "This should be required reading on UX" series, specifically on Discoverability...

[damont]

Wow.