
Everyone's first Vi session - iamelgringo
http://bash.org/?795779?
======
mhartl
One of my college friends suprised me by "saving" a paper she was working on
in vi by typing ':wq' and then typing 'vi <paper>' at the command line. Turns
out she thought that ':wq' was how you saved in vi, and was happy when I told
her to try typing just ':w' instead.

~~~
eru
[...] and was happy when I told ter to try typing just ':x' instead.

------
tokipin
i can't imagine not programming in Vim. it's so natural. using a normal text
editor (including professional IDE's) feels like trudging through quagmire by
comparison

a mistake learners of Vi make is being in insert mode most of the time. you
should be in command mode almost always. like 94% of the time. otherwise it's
no different than a normal text editor with hotkeys. also, newbies need to
make use the repeat command '.' which repeats the whole last text _change_.
it's not just a paste

once you get some good experience and try to stay out of insert mode, your
cursor starts flying around performing all sorts of uber hacker slice & dice
magic

~~~
abstractbill
I feel the same way about emacs. A few nights back I was editing my wife's
website - making quite a lot of use of keyboard macros, regex search-and-
replace, and that kind of thing. She's only ever used MS-Word so she was
continuously asking me "how do you _do_ that?"

~~~
tx
After years of Visual Studio I forced myself to learn vim and it wasn't so
hard. By "learned" I mean crossing a line where my productivity is on par or
better than Visual Studio used to be.

Emacs, however, is nowhere as easy. I am trying to repeat my vim experience by
forcing myself to use emacs (part of my CL adventure) and I feel like I need a
third hand to hold Ctrl or Alt all the time... Even vim-style navigation
without arrows calls for constantly pressed Ctrl.

Not trying to start a war, just sharing my experience. After all it was other
peoples "vim tales" that inspired me in the first place.

------
davidw
Sort of like the ed session here:

<http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.msg.html>

"Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is generous enough
to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with
verbosity."

------
far33d
For a while I thought the only way to quit vi was to cntl-z and then kill.

~~~
eru
That's what I thought of (command-line) emacs first.

------
weel
The first time I used vi was in a summer camp while I was in high school. I
had accidentally entered "view foo.txt" into a command prompt on a Linux box,
and "view" was symlinked to "vi."

We couldn't figure out how to fix this, so we asked the instructor, who
replied to us in a heavy German accent: "aha, you see, vi ees an edeetor, and
weez everyzing eet does eet say beeeep."

Actually, he was speaking Dutch with a German accent, not English, but you get
the idea.

------
bayareaguy
It may have been that way once but these days if you use vim, by the time you
get to the second ^C the message

Type :quit<Enter> to exit Vim

will appear.

------
kajecounterhack
@mhartl: I did the same thing until I went and read up on vi long ago...

Also when I finally learned that you could copy and paste into the terminal
with ctrl+shift+v/c, I cried tears of joy. Back then, as a nub on linux and
copying all those long commands from forum boards without copy/paste...yes. it
really was the dark ages.

------
gscott
What is the difference between vi and Pico? I always found vi a mystery and
just used pico instead.

~~~
jey
Vi is a text editor for serious text editing, it takes some getting used to
but is chock full of powerful features. Pico is designed for people who
occasionally log into a UNIX machine to check mail or something (its origins
are in Pine, which is an email client for UNIX newbies). As a programmer you
spend all day editing text, so it's definitely worth putting in the effort to
learn how to use a good text editor.

After a decade of regular use I'm only an intermediate vim user, but what I
know so far _really_ helps with my productivity.

[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=vim%20tutorial](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=vim%20tutorial)

------
damon
Imagine what the emacs version would look like. M-q C-q M-C-q M-x quit ...

~~~
abstractbill
Menu->File->Quit

I have the menu bar switched off though, so a new user trying my emacs
wouldn't have a clue.

