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Comment by vog | Hacker News Reader

> Famous example: trying to exit vi

To be fair, this has been fixed a long time ago. At least Vim (which is the Vi installed on most systems) shows the following message on startup:

  ~                     VIM - Vi IMproved                       
  ~                                                             
  ~                      version 7.4.1829                       
  ~                  by Bram Moolenaar et al.                   
  ~                          [...]
  ~        Vim is open source and freely distributable          
  ~                                                             
  ~               Help poor children in Uganda!                 
  ~       type  :help iccf<Enter>       for information         
  ~                                                             
  ~       type  :q<Enter>               to exit                 
  ~       type  :help<Enter>  or  <F1>  for on-line help        
  ~       type  :help version7<Enter>   for version info

On the other hand, it doesn't show this message when you call "vi" with a filename. But at least a beginner running "vi" for the first time should be taken care by this.

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Someone unfamiliar might just be dumped into vi because some other program thought it'd be great to open a text editor, e.g. for a commit message. You're unlikely to run vi intentionally unless you also know you want to run vi and how to exit, I guess.

Programs that put you into Vi, /should/ be calling $EDITOR, if $EDITOR is to to Vi(m), you should know how to use it.

Also, if you ^C in Vi, you get the message:

  Type  :quit<Enter>  to exit Vim

And what if $EDITOR is not set ? Vi is the standard POSIX editor, calling it makes sense.

Actually, defaulting from $VISUAL to vi and from $EDITOR to ex (or ed) is what -- strictly speaking -- makes sense.

Remember what the difference between $VISUAL and $EDITOR was intended to be. There's a whole range of places in Unix where there was, and even still is, a distinction between a line editor and a full screen editor. Consider, for just one example, the ~v and ~e commands in BSD Mail.

Now enjoy the discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13113556 .

I do think distros should change their default $EDITOR to nano.

Debian has done exactly that, years ago.

It tends to annoy me, but it's easy enough to change :)

Yeah happened to me. It's probably standard for anyone trying to learn GIT.

to be fair thats not enough either. someone might accidentally have pressed 'a' , and now good luck understanding how to get out of it without having a crash course on vim

Yeah, whenever I run some program, I just press a random key like "a" to get started. ;)

It's not unreasonable to start typing in a text editor and you're likely to hit a or i sooner or later ...

pkill vi

Actually I found the colon 'syntax' at the beginning of the command to be quite confusing - I wasn't aware that youre supposed to literally type shift + semicolon. That's completely unintuitive compared to 'regular' shortcuts you see in nano like ctrl + c.

I consider myself a major vim beginner, only using it for commit messages, very light file creations, and checking out config settings files when sshed into a server. I have never seen this screen.

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