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Comment by ygra | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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