I added a fun random ASCII art welcome screen to Vim

blog.merlinsbeard.ai

10 points·jakemanger··6 comments

> If you use vim, you’re probably just like me. You spend way too much time customising your config files

Well, no, I do not. I use vi because I know it will be there [1] when I need it no matter on what device I happen to find myself. Fiddling with configuration files to make it behave differently would mean it behaves differently depending on where my terminal happens to point, negating one of the big advantages - that of muscle memory - of using vi.

[1] or at least easily installable in some way

I also don't, but I am in a third category that somehow never seems to get much representation: I spent some good time 20 years ago to make vim work the way I want, but now I have barely done anything to my configuration since.

`vim` is as easily installable as `vi`. If you want to be confident that the editor is present on the system, you could also choose to use `ed` which is also included in POSIX.1-2001 Utilities and POSIX.1-2008 Utilities.

It's a series of probabilities; much of the time, you can install whatever editor you want, but vi being included in ex. busybox means that there are places where it's really nice to be able to use vi because it's there by default and installing something else would be inconvenient. For example, every Alpine Linux container has vi, as does the OpenWRT base system.

I've done a similar thing for one of my servers, with just a simple `fortune | ponysay` in the .bashrc. It's a bit silly but it makes me smile

It's not fun ascii art, it's being lectured at with a smiley face

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