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Comment by soraminazuki | Hacker News Reader

Ah yes, I forgot about that. But I'm kind of skeptical that complete beginners would start poking around vim by opening a file directly though.

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From the git documentation:

  *core.editor*
  
  *By default, Git uses whatever you’ve set as your default text editor via
  one of the shell environment variables VISUAL or EDITOR, or else falls back
  to the vi editor to create and edit your commit and tag messages*

  https://www.git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Configuration

It seems that many people leave their default editor undefined so git opens vi for commit messages by default. vi tends to be symlinked to vim on many systems so that means they end up in vim (not that it makes a difference, I'm just being pedantic :).

Yeah, I think the most common case is git beginners typing `git commit` without the -m flag. This was my first (unwilling) baptism into Vim.

Ug yes. This is why I always pass -m to commit, at the risk of losing the containing terminal session to forcible closure. I know quitting it is colon exclamation something or other, but it's always quicker just to start from scratch than to look it up.

As a complete vim beginner this is what I did and still do. I have never opened it fresh as I don't know how to then open a file :D

when it's the default editor and you go to add a cron job...

You've definitely got a point.

Doesn't ctrl/cmd-c remind you of the exit sequence?

Yes it does! But how will they know to hit Ctrl+C? /s

The "obvious" reason would be if a person is used to terminals but not vim, as ctrl-c usually kills processes.

I think a lot of confusion could be avoided if distributions like Ubuntu, that are commonly used by new Linux users, were to set e.g. EDITOR=nano in their default ~/.bashrc. That way, writing "git commit" from a terminal, typing "v" inside less, etc. would all bring up nano instead of vim by default.

/s means "sarcasm" :-)

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