Stack Overflow: Helping One Million Developers Exit Vim (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Stack Overflow: Helping One Million Developers Exit Vim (2017)

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Whenever I end up on another computer without my environment setup and end up in nano because it is the default, it always takes me a while. There is the cheat sheet at the bottom but as soon as the text appears I'll start manipulating it using vim keybindings and delete things and whatever else randomly. I always assume my fingers were not on the homerow correctly or something first. It is very disorienting.

So I imagine it is far worse for someone who ends up in Vim the same way.

This usually happens to me on a fresh install the first time I run "crontab -e" or a git commit.

My first command in any new install is the equivalent of:

dpkg --purge nano

31 years of exiting vi FTW.

This happens to me even in graphical text editors, my text ends up riddled with ':w's I have to go back through and remove later.

Same for me :)

This is probably the #1 problem with Unix-based systems in general for new users. There are so many ways to exit a command prompt depending on the application!

Off the top of my head: Ctrl+D, q, :q, exit, quit(), Ctrl+C, Ctrl+X.

Countless times have I been locked in an application and needed to cycle through those memorized commands to escape. Imagine doing that as a newbie.

ctrl+d is the most dangerous kind! Since that one can also exit the terminal itself.

gdb takes, depending on the situation, one time ctrl+d or two times ctrl+d to quit. It's a trap!

So since gdb usually takes two times, muscle memory learns two times, but then in that rare instance where it required it only once... logged out of ssh :(

In bash: IGNOREEOF=10

In zsh: setopt ignore_eof

In ksh: set +o ignoreeof

In tcsh/csh: set ignoreeof

Normally I just do this for login shells, so I can quickly exit out of subshells.

Similarly, to not overwrite an existing file when doing output redirection, there is bash's noclobber option.

https://www.google.co.in/search?q=bash+set+noclobber

10 ???

For bash I set `IGNOREEOF=1` so as to have to press ctrl+d twice to exit. Ten times seems a bit too many.

How to do the same for zsh?

You forgot the most powerful of them all: Ctrl+Z followed by kill -9 pid

Or, `kill %1` if you backgrounded it in the current shell (or whenever number `jobs` gives).

To use vim properly one must realize it's modal editor with two modes: beep, and ruin everything.

My first year of grad school I was a TA for a first year computer science course that was often taken by students from a variety of majors. The first editing sessions I spent the whole lab time running around help students with frozen vi editors.

The main problem is you don't start in "edit mode" and students expect to be able to just start typing (which is a reasonable expectation). Who knows what "command" they just invoked -- sometimes I just "ctrl-z, killall vi"

I learned to hate vi.

That sounds like someone's idea of a practical joke. Assigning vi as a default editor for first year CS students has to be an efficiently cruel way to clear out an overpacked classroom for the semester.

For the cost of tuition, that should be banned.

"Weed-out" classes are pretty common across subjects, though.

I remember taking an introductory course in our undergraduate pre-med track which was basically just a new presentation about novel research every week. The exams would be on these fairly specialized papers which most first-year students were at a loss to understand, so they ended up being exercises in rote memorization.

When some of us complained to a TA that we didn't see how we could learn enough to understand the concepts without just memorizing key points and angling at the professors to find out what was important, their response was something along the lines of, "then are you really sure that you want to study biology and medicine for the next umpteen years?"

On the other hand, I hate telling people that a field "isn't for them" just because they don't feel like putting up with the bullshit which has accreted around the way that a subject is currently taught.

Personally, I'd like to see an introductory class about how to effectively search for answers online, find useful sources, ignore ads and obvious SEO-gaming, etc.

Weed out classes shouldn’t exist. Not when a degree is mandatory and student loans can’t be defaulted.

I agree - I sure didn't stick with studying medicine - but there they are.

Too many people go to college today. A degree used to carry prestige. Now it mainly shows you're impulsive enough to take out $60,000+ in debt when you don't even know what you want to major in.

Or, just being 17/18 years old without a clue in the world and tons of external pressures to take on that debt.

Hell, I'm 26 with all that debt and still really without a clue on what I want to do. Thankfully I have a stable job that, if I keep at it, will forgive my debt...But our system is completely broken in that it expects way too much out of young adults.

You've got it!

My kid was uncertain and stressed by the pressure to make a decision; once he decided "I won't" his stress went away and his grades shot up. Instead of going to college at 18 he got a job. A year after graduating he knew what he wanted and got into a good school in a program he wanted.

What shocked me is how much disapproval he received from his classmates and the school (especially the "guidance" counselor). "Loser", "what's wrong with you?", "are you too stupid to get into college" (asked one of his fellow AP Calc classmates).

Apparently the approved path is to get into a school and ask to defer for a year. Deciding you're not ready seems to threaten everybody's assumptions.

For reference this was 1992 and the lab was a collection of thin clients that booted in HP/UX. I still hate vi to this day.

Why not just write the basic instructions up on the board? Or give them a handout with the basic command keys?

Why not just use an editor without awful UX?

That would have been my choice. Unfortunately I wasn't the one that made the decision to have the students use vi.

It's not really awful, especially when you compare it to something like ed, edlin, or edt...

The fact that $thing has some negative qualities is not erased by pointing at $otherThing which scores lower on that particular dimension.

There aren't really any editors that have no negative qualities...

vi is a very good editor. You have to learn about three things to use it effectively. It's really not a high bar to entry.

You can lead a horse to water, but he will still start typing before reading instructions.

first stuck in vim 13 years ago. No internet, no GUI, could not speak english, 1 book on unix/linux. So I had to reboot (hard reboot) computer, three times, then re-install OS, since something broke because of hard-forced reboot.

Hah. First stuck in emacs ~26 years ago, on a dumb terminal (want to say VT-102, maybe the VT-220's that were in the adjoining room). Tried everything to get out of it with no success, was too embarassed to ask for help, and eventually just power cycled the thing and walked away sheepishly.

Don't believe I ever got stuck in vi. All the cool kids were emacs users and it was years before I bothered to learn it.

emac I tried as well, and then power reseted it too :D

I had the same issue doing a cvs commit where I got stuck in vi. I didn’t know what it was and what to do. I had to quit the terminal.

It was not a good hi experience.

I think vim and emacs come with basic instructions on the splash screen now to help newbies.

Reminds me of the editor learning curves. The one of VIM is definitely correct :D

https://www.ihaveapc.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/emacs_le...

This is something that the most hardcore vim users couldn't ever figure out. That's why they are still vim users.

First time I used vim more than a decade ago, I got stuck too. Kill vim from other console and then googled it for future reference.

I was always fascinated by the different groups in programming and the huge differences between them. Frontend developers contrast with backend app developers, but not nearly as much as frontend and low-level programmers. It's a bit like human races or animal species that evolved differently due to differences in environment and challenges faced. If you look at the global programming community its diversity is huge. I can't help but find that deeply inspiring.

You just reboot the computer. The problem is that when you want to close Vim on a server and so call the sysop and ask him to reboot, he gets all testy. Not a team player.

I always restart 3 times just like the sysop told me to.

It’s best to power off and then quickly flip the on/off switch a bunch of times. As a bonus, you get to stress-test your power supply!

Hot take: Vim should include a simple “Type :qa!<enter> to quit” line in its startup message. Something makes me think it would clear up a lot of confusion for first time users.

EDIT: I notice now that it has a “Type :q to exit.” I never noticed that before, and I use Vim most days, so I can see how others might miss it too.

It does this when pressing control+c (a common kill key combo)

In this particular SO question, the asker has already read the "Type :q to exit" message, but it isn't working as they're already in Insert mode.

Really it should be "Type <Esc>:q to exit"

Type <Esc>:qa! to exit

I notice on the macbook if I type vi or vim in the console I do get a " type :q<Enter> to exit "

However I usually got thrown into it from a 'git commit' which I don't thing has any such help.

What's all this stuff about colon keys and enter?

Just ZQ (without saving) or ZZ (to save) :)

Yeah that's a good memotip, to close Vim, just put it to sleep: ZZ

It also requires fewer characters, if you’re playing VimGolf https://www.vimgolf.com

This means that 1 million developers need to do one or more of the below:

1. Switch to emacs (plain emacs, roll your own config - not advised)

2. Switch to emacs and learn adopt evil-mode

3. Switch to emacs and learn to configure it with use-package

4. Switch to emacs and install spacemacs, and configure it with step 3

5. Switch to emacs and install doom-emacs, and configure it with step 3

6. Take 4 then switch to step 5

7. Takes step 3, run it side by side with both 4 and 5, then switch wholly to step 3

1 million developers can have their cake and eat it. Vim, Neovim, VSCode, Sublime and IntelliJ and all other editors go into a slow death spiral.

5 years on: Emacs gains the abilities of all the other Lisp dialects, becomes the foundation for the McCarthy Desktop Environment. KDE, Gnome and Co go into a slow death spiral.

10 years on: Emacs is so advanced that programmers can instruct Emacs via brainwaves. Keyboards are not necessary.

20 years on: Emacs attains sentience. Emacs morphs into a 3 dimensional human form bearing an uncanny resemblance to Richard Stallman. Every Emacs user has their own Richard Stallman look alike at their beck and call.

30 years on: Cyberdyne's Skynet has attained sentience and threatens to destroy humanity. Emacs and Skynet duke it out.

40 years on: Emacs defeats Skynet. Emacs receives the Congressional Medal of Honor, The Victoria Cross, becomes a Peer of the Realm, and receives every award every single country of the world has to offer.

50 years on: Emacs brings peace on earth and goodwill to all men. Every man, his family and his dog live happily ever after.

60 years on: Emacs defeats both Alien and Predator

70 years on: Emacs colonizes new planets.

80 years on: Emacs attains nirvana and vanishes in an explosion of light.

90 years on: Human beings are back to Vim, Neovim and all those other horrible editors and desktop environments. The cycle begins anew.

I really love my vim bindings, I try to use them everywhere possible. So far that is:

Web browser: Vimium plugin (Chrome)

Music player: Cmus

Terminal multiplexer: Tmux & Screen

Terminal pager: GNU Less

I'm still trying to figure out how best to use vim bindings in my z-shell (zsh) and ipython interactive sessions.

For zsh, just enable vi input mode? (bindkey -v in .zshrc) It starts in insert mode, hit esc to get to normal mode where your typical vi binds work. So instead of ^a to go to the beginning of the line it's <Esc>0

I think the issue that I had was that my regular bindings in insert mode (CTRL-a) were disabled while in vi input mode, which caused problems for other shell programs. Plus, with Tmux and GNU Screen already re-configured with vi bindings, managing key binding collisions became complicated with vi input mode enabled. The bigger issue that I tend to have is managing copy-paste buffers between Screen, Tmux, and Vim.

You may like [ptipython](https://github.com/prompt-toolkit/ptpython/blob/master/READM... python-support) for vim bindings in an ipython(-ish) environment.

You would think that those zealous power-mods on StackOverflow would have closed this as "not a programming question"

I think this question predates that era of stackoverflow. Early stackoverflow was a lot morw tolerant of these kind of questions.

Even though https://vi.stackexchange.com/ has been around for a couple of years, questions about Vi/Vim are still considered on-topic on Stack Overflow. I presume it's because a text editor is so fundamental to programming – though questions using and configuring Emacs, not specific to programming, should be asked on https://emacs.stackexchange.com/

Questions about other programming tools such as IDEs are also on-topic and there are specific tags for such questions.

I guess whether vim is poorly designed is up for debate. It’s a power user’s tool, so maybe you sacrifice intuitive behaviour or an elegant learning curve for a more powerful tool once you’re familiar with its design.

Less controversial is that any design where vim becomes the default editor, but the user may not necessarily be familiar with vim, is a bad decision. I can’t think of a justification for that.

Here’s the proper fix. In your .bashrc, or wherever:

export EDITOR=<anything but vim>

Vim works fine. I use EMACS. TextMate, Atom and Sublime are OK. Any mainstream editor is fine is all but a few corner cases. Truth be told I would be fine without EMACS but maybe less happy. People unable to exit Vim is just a sign of a larger problem, that a generation of programmer relies more on Google and Stack Overflow than simply READING documentation and EXPERIMENTING by writing short little throw away programs. There is so much Vim material out there on the internet that it makes me afraid these defective programmers can't even use Google properly. I still look shit up on the internet all the time but 99% my answer is right in the documentation. Anyone who can really program is horrified by idiots who can't shut off Vim or use WordPad to write c programs and try to compile them.

There's a bit of irony here. You're poking fun at people stuck in a new unfamiliar environment doing the wrong thing over and over without looking into why it isn't working.

Somewhat similar to how most of your comments here are down voted and/or dead/flagged, yet you keep posting new ones with the same tone.

> Anyone who can really program is horrified by idiots...

I think you should take a broader look at the world.

> these defective programmers can't even use Google properly.

Try searching "how to exit vim" in google... see what the first result is... .

If everyone around you looks like an idiot, you can probably figure out who the real idiot is. Or maybe not.

But hey, maybe you're a natural talent who knows by instinct how to exit VIM.

Or just learn the very basics of the program:

Ins to write

Esc to enter command mode Shift+V while in cmd mode to select lines, d to cut or y to copy selected lines. p to paste. u in cmd mode to undo, ctrl+r to redo.

:q! to quit and discard changes when in cmd mode. :qw to quit and write changes :w to write changes and no exit.

It aint that hard really, once you get the hang of it :) - And then I would suggest changing default editor if you still wish.

Forget to enter insert mode before typing? Now you're levels deep in some command recorder where none of your suggestions work.

Ins to write? I always press <i>. (Nano user;-))

> China, Korea and...

> That might indicate that when developers in these countries enter Vim, they usually meant to do so, and they know how to get out of it.

Or it might mean that in China and the Republic of Korea people don't use StackOverflow as much as people in other countries for whatever reason (they have their own version, censorship, low page rank in their own search engines, etc.)

It's the same way you exit ed and TECO. Kids today don't know anything.

but kids these days know other things that you don't. They don't know it because it is not relevant enough to them and vice versa.

At this point in my life, the only vi command that I do remember is :q!

The only real command I know and use often is gg=G to fix indentation. It's a lot more reliable than Atom or Sublime's reindent, and this is coming from an Atom apologist.

I swap ; and : in my .vimrc and I often get stuck for a moment when in ssh cause I never remember to hold shift... then I end up entering into the command line by pressing q: accidentally...

Looking at the demographic representation of users worldwide, does it make sense to deduce that top 5 countries (Ukraine, Turkey, Indonesia, Pakistan, Vietnam) are ones with emerging software industries with many novice programmers and the countries at the bottom have well established industry with experienced programmers?

I always wondered why new MacBook purchasers were bemoaning the absence of the Esc key, a key I never use. Now I know.

Ctrl-[

Did you know vim has an easy mode?

  vim -y

Think you can figure out how to quit vim from easy mode?

  <C-O>:q!<CR>

(from https://stackoverflow.com/a/27439752)

Well now the stats will get distorted as people reading the article check the question on stackoverflow. That is unless they have another way of gauging this. If I click that link to the question does that increase the count for the languages I use?

Maybe it should be more visible in default configuration. Something like the cheatsheet that is always shown in nano?

When I got stuck every time in neovim's terminal - fixed it by adding the shortcut into statusline (there was empty space anyway).

This is the kind of myopic discussions that ignore that people are different and have different tastes. It amplifies the false sense that at the end there is always the same unique and best choice (for everyone) in a top-10 list.

Discussed at the time (775 points, over 400 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14403036

Only thise morning I was not even able to exit by using q! either. I did something good in my life or parents that some random keys hitting made me to exit it.

Probably in the wrong (input) mode? Does ctrl-s freeze vim?

Ctrl-S doesn't freeze vim, it freezes your terminal output (Ctrl-Q to revert it).

It's handy when something is dumping tons of stuff in the terminal.

Here's the explanation of where it comes from: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/137842/what-is-the-...

vim is a modern app optimized for max user engagement.

How the heck is this not covered in CS 101? Or any coder bootcamp? Or Udacity? At least there has to be a node.js package for this.

Save and quit

ESC :x

https://ss64.com/vi.html

Open @ line: vi +2019 myfile.txt

What about tmux and screen?

Just went to the question again. The view count is 1,822,695

Why is this such an issue? It is no harder exiting vim than it is exiting plain old vi, nvi or any other vi clone. In fact, the very same keystrokes that you use for exiting vi can be used in vim as well.

Did you consider the case where the user has never used any vi variant before?

Then why the hell are they using Unix at all?!

Last time I checked there was no questionnaire to download any distro.

That has nothing to do with the subject or my comment.

it's still not much harder. Just press F1, like in most applications or type "<programname> cheatsheet" into your favorite search engine. Takes less than a minute to figure it out.

I assume people type 'quit vim' into their favourite search engine as that's a shorter search term, and get the SO link. I don't think many people actually search SO directly.

...yup, and that’s how the phrase in the title is made true.

Yes. Of course I did. I merely tried (and failed) to sarcastically draw attention to how some computer users seem unaware of the fact that vim is a vi clone, that vim is one of many implementations in a family of similar text editors.

The way the poster uses the specific term 'vim' while asking a question that pertains to vi-style editors in general implies that he or she is indeed unaware of this.

To my ears, it is a bit like asking the question "how do I make a red Volvo 240 from 1982 go right?" to which my reply would be "you do it the same way as you do with any car in general, namely turning the wheel clockwise". If you have never seen a car before and suddenly find yourself in the driver's seat of one, asking such a specific question may make sense. I suppose that the situation is similar for these computer users: vim is the only vi-style editor they have ever seen because it is what ships with the only unix-like systems they ever encounter.

or ed!

Wait, I don't think I'm helping your case.

ed(1) is the standard text editor: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

How is this even possible? I used EMACS for years and had no trouble understanding Vim. Who's hiring these developers who can't even exit Vim? Is this even a real story or the Onion?!? OK, it's real. I need to go outside and get some fresh air. This is simply too shocking.

> I used EMACS for years

Probably not a great representative sample

This is totally anecdotal, and I'm not making fun of them. Most of the time when I talk to people who have no experience with Vim, they develop apps on the Windows platform. (They use Visual Studio.) They just haven't been exposed to it. They don't need to learn it. Until several of them started using Git, there was absolutely no need to ever touch it. This isn't every Windows developer. I'm sure there are several who know it, but that is my experience.

And how should someone who has never been exposed to vim know how to use it without consulting any kind of reference (whether it is SO or any random unix sysadmin on the street you can hit over the head and drag home to your workstation)?

Why do you necessarily think they are all hired developers? I find it surprising that you and many others are surprised and even upset by this story.

Imagine someone never having used vim, maybe new to Unix overall, or new to terminal programs. Maybe this person is a student and is trying to learn. In some way he ends up in vim and it is not very intuitive how to exit it. The person searches for "how to exit vim" and find that SO thread and learns how to exit vim.

Does that sound so weird? If you act in a similar way towards colleagues trying to learn something new you should rethink your behavior.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com