- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
POV: you opened ed for the first time
? help ? ? ? quit ? exit ? bye ? hello? ? eat flaming death ? ^C ? ^C ? ^D ?
^C ^\ ^Z kill -9 (from another session)
If I can’t kill the child process, I kill its parent and go on with my life.
Sure, but the above is from a gnu humour post that’s over 30 years old: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html
vim & sleep 30 && killall -TERM vim
I switched from vi to vim in 1994 and found it immediately obvious how to quit — it was just like vi!
I guess I’ll never understand these memes.
POV: You open vim for the first time.

Fair, but there’s a worse experience possible.
For a time, many people’s first encounter with
vi
was when it auto-opened a temporary editor to ask them to submit a commit message for the git command they just ran.This experience skips the
vi
“welcome” screen, because a file is open.As a bonus challenge,
git
did not inform the user what editor is in use, and the user had no particular reason to even expect an editor to appear, based on what they were just doing.None of this was the fault of
vi
, really. But it was a terrible introduction.It got better when various operating systems changed their default command line editor to
nano
, andgit
added some helpful adjustments - “if certain settings are not configured, assume a new user and show verbose welcome messages”.More like:
The image shows the last state of a terminal emulator of person without command line or git knowledge. The person attempted to run
git commit
and is now blaming the result of a specific configuration on their system that launches a vi derivative on the vi derivative itself. This image is expected to convince the viewer that the vi derrivative is to blame.
You cannot expect people to read, it’s unreasonable.
I mean, there are blind users.
I hope the accessibility program to read the screen can read this.
I’ve heard they can be spotty, although I’m personally sighted. That’s usually the reason people post transcripts, anyway.
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Type
h
for “hello” does literally nothing… ok… thought this was a text editor why can’t I even write… mashesc
still no response, try typing “hello” but no matter how many time I mashh
nothing happens. Right let’s leave and find a guide. Right so closing a terminal program that’s usuallyCrtl-c
nope that’s done nothing, erm, what else works, nano usesCtrl-x
let’s try that, nope. Ermkill
nope nothing, fuck this I’m just closing my terminal. - my first vim experience.This…this hits way to close to home.
<esc>:q!
I have accidentally opened it so many times. I have to look how to close it every time
I mean, just type
:help
and then use your arrow keys to scroll around and read how to use vim/neovim.Learning how to use documentation should be the first thing you do when you try the Linux terminal.
man vim
, Vim page on the archwiki, etc.
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What do you mean “build our dev environments around vim”? If you mean they write dev tooling in vimscript and explicitly require everyone to use it, I actually agree with you. I don’t believe employers should really ever force any particular editor or IDE if the work is getting done. I would be equally annoyed by a workplace forcing me to use vscode instead of vim. It would slow me down way too much.
If you are just complaining that they build dev tooling as a CLI, hard disagree. That is absolutely what dev tooling should use because it’s actually universal and can be used regardless of your editor choice.
At my workplace, our dev tooling is done via CLI and our developers use vim, emacs, and vscode. Because it’s all CLI, it’s easy for individual developers to add their own scripts to automate parts of their workflow as they see fit (and if such automations are deemed useful by the group at large, it will get merged into our shared devtools repo). We even have some editor-specific stuff in there people have written that they find useful, but it’s entirely optional.
Are you guys actual programmers? What’s wrong with using Vim for development?
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That’s fine and you don’t need to. But don’t knock it if you haven’t even taken time to learn it.
Yesterday I needed to insert a tab character on every line from 2 to 31,000 something. I made the line selection keystrokes in Cursor - it immediately crashed so hard I had to restart my PC.
Vim did it in a few milliseconds.
Oh. I’m going to go practice some of that now. Thanks for the link.
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Vscode definitely can’t handle large files like vim can. I can open files that are multiple GBs in vim without issue. Vscode definitely cannot.
You always have to learn the processes in a new company, this is just part of that. And if they don’t give you the explanations, training and time to learn, that’s a good sign you wouldn’t want to be at this company.
Maybe also speak to some of your new colleagues, whether they had similar trouble and see if you can improve the process for the next person.
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This thread seems entirely filled with people who seem to not grasp my core point.
We grasp the core point: vim is not typical. This is not insightful.
What we care more about is the link to the jobs portal of the company there will be an opening at soon that uses vim as it’s standard dev tool chain.
I agree with your core point, but no software is intuitive.
You can learn enough Vim to be productive in it in about 3 minutes.
You can install some plugins; your experienced coworkers have probably figured that out for you.
It’s ok to be a junior, but you should investigate things from time to time. You may even surprise yourself.
But you do you.
I’m a vim novice. I basically know just enough to save files or quit, paste with formatting, and “insert” changes. I think I used to know how to find within a file, and I’m sure I could learn again in an instant, but I haven’t had to do that in a long time for my noobish tasks. I know it is way more capable than that, but I haven’t had to learn more features yet since I use it at a ‘nano’ level.
I agree it only takes 3 minutes to learn these things, but personally it took me a bit longer to make them muscle memory.
I get it if someone were to be annoyed that things they knew how to do in another program they had to re-learn in vim, but this kind of thing it seems like you would just accept that you’re going to be frustrated and then put in the work to learn it so you can work more easily with your coworkers or whatever. Like you said, vim has serious advantages, and it seems a little short sighted to not be willing to learn from people that want to train you up in a tool to be more effective.
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Last post from me. I have given you accurate information in good faith. Since you’ve decided to become aggressive and hostile, I can tell that you’re an unpleasant person and I’m glad you’re not on my team.
Good luck and have fun out there.