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Comment by Gehinnn | Hacker News Reader

I think even complex products should have a linear progression from newcomers, curiously exploring the product for the first time, to experts, who want to do certain tasks as fast as possible.

It's simply not possible to learn vi by just using vi.

Also, the author emphasizes that just dumbening a product is not the solution.

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Any examples of software that accomplishs this well?

A quick summary of my experience:

- Most complex apps are not learnable linearly: Ableton Live, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro X, Photoshop, After Effects, Blender, all practically require reading the manual.

- A few apps are ok at it: Adobe Lightroom, and Sketch, although those apps also are probably less powerful than those in the first category, e.g., Photoshop can do the majority of what both of those apps can do, and more.

I would actually put shells and text editors as some of the easiest complex apps to learn linearly, because you can do so much with them with just cut and pasting text from the internet. Try following along with a Blender tutorial video that's not for an absolute beginner, and you'll get stuck almost immediately, because you won't know the keyboard shortcuts to perform the actions in the video. This happens far less with programming tutorials involving text editors and terminals.

> It's simply not possible to learn vi by just using vi.

I did. I learnt vi when I was told go fix this file on that computer, you have ssh, x forwarding won't work because you have 3 hops (embedded devices that won't allow forwarding of any kind), there is only vi on the box.

So I figured out how to use vi. It is not rocket science, there is not that much to learn, vi muscle memory takes time but also not even that long I think.

Did you read about vi before? How do you know all the shortcuts?

I googled it. I did not know vi before that, and now I use vim as my main editor for code.

So you did not just "learn vi by just using vi". You have also used a browser, google, and tutorials found by google. There is nothing wrong with that. In fact congratulation on learning vi! But sadly your example does not illustrate that one can "learn vi by just using vi".

The intro screen tells you exactly how to open help and exit. Man gives you even clearer instructions.

If you just launch vim it tells you the basics of how to use it, and how to get more help. So it's definitely possible to learn it without external resources.

Emacs is the same.

There's not much to learn if you're editing the odd file ... if you want to use vim as an effective development tool, there's loads to learn.

I would think there is a lot less to learn with vi than with Visual Studio.

I certainly learned vi from vi (or I guess vim to be specific). The start page says "type :help or press <F1>", which led me to the help pages (and maybe doing vimtutor, can't quite remember), and then I "learned vi(m)" just working at it, poking and prodding at the various corners (and the manual for is excellent). No Google, no stack overflow, no teacher. Later I started looking up other peoples configurations and stuff, as well as some advanced guides, but I was already basically proficient at that point.

On the other hand: I don't see what's so bad about a product for professionals where you might need a teacher to help you learn. Photoshop is not a simple product to use if you've never interacted with it before and most users go through some tutorial or has a teacher or something. It doesn't mean that Photoshop has bad UX. This goes for lots of software made for professional use: try learning Autodesk Maya or Avid without external resources, I dare you.

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