First time when you ssh into your Linux terminal and you gotta “sudo crontab -e” or something and it’s like “what editor do you want to use?” and nano sounds lame so you choose vim cause the sound is cool when you say it and then you have to wipe the whole comp and start over

  • AVincentInSpace@pawb.socialEnglish
    42·
    9 months ago

    How do I exit Vim?

    escape colon w q

    One of life’s great mysteries

    escape colon w q

    I’m pretty sure it’s impossible

    it is literally. the first result on google.

    The best way is to change to another terminal and forcequit it from there

    escape then Shift+Z twice also works. or shift+Z shift+Q to quit without saving.

    Or hard restart your entire computer

    Are you people allergic to search engines or someth–

    Bill Joy made vi impossible to exit because he wanted the source to always be open

    siiiiiiiiigh

    Yes, I’m an old man yelling at cloud, but Vim and Neovim are fantastic text editors that really are worth the half hour you’ll spend running through the tutorial to learn them, and the subsequent two weeks you’ll spend installing plugins and configuring it exactly to your liking. It really does make writing software more efficient and really doesn’t deserve the reputation it gets from “vim is hard to exit lmao” memes made by people who haven’t bothered to change their $EDITOR to nano, had it launch automatically when they tried to write a commit message, and instantly decided it was just yet another piece of arcane 80s Unix bullshit

    • commandar@lemmy.world
      19·
      9 months ago

      vi isn’t a text editor as much as it’s a text manipulation language.

      It has a syntax, grammar, idioms, and, yes, a learning curve.

      But once you learn it, it’s as close to a brain-computer interface as I’ve experienced. You start thinking about edits as chainable operations and it literally becomes muscle memory – if you ask someone experienced with vi how they just did a complex sequence of edits, chances are they’ll have to stop and consciously walk through it because they literally didn’t have to think about it the first time.

      • hulemy@ani.socialEnglish
        5·
        9 months ago

        got any online course recommendations? my college recommended missing semester for the basics of the basics, but i know there are so many more and other vim workflows (easy motions etc)

        although i should first start getting into touch typing

    • AVengefulAxolotl@lemmy.world
      4·
      9 months ago

      At first I did now understand it, why would you even use it??(vim / neovim) It would take ages to learn it all. Then got around to try it, and in a span of like a week, I couldnt go back to editing text with a mouse. I wasnt efficient at first, but damn was it fun. Just cruising around the codebase without touching the mouse (as much as i could.)

      Yeah, it makes you more efficient if youve learnt it enough, but at the same time, it makes editing literal text way more enjoyable. You need to edit some boilerplate, and it actually becomes somewhat interesting like: ‘Can I use a macro here’, or 'How can i do it the most efficient way?’.

      I think it also gives you a state of mind as well (for me it definitely shaped it.) You want to learn your tools, you want to understand what makes a good text editor (ex. LSP), or just perfecting your usabilitx of a terminal / shell.

      At the same time, damn sometimes its a straight up curse that i learnt vim. I open any other text editor and i just curse the whole time: 'Where are my vim motions?!!?

      P.S. Remapping Escape to Caps Lock made vim usability to a 10 for me.

      • TheHarpyEagle@lemmy.world
        3·
        9 months ago

        I actually learned while writing docs for work because it was boring as fuck otherwise. Now I’m one of those people. Give it a shot if you want to spice up (and dramatically slow down at first) some tedious work for a bit.

      • AVincentInSpace@pawb.socialEnglish
        1·
        9 months ago

        step 1. alt
        step 2. tab

        alternately:
        step 1. switch VTs back to your desktop environment and Google it there

        if you’re using vim without a GUI running at all (I hate embedded systems too):
        step 1. you still have your phone on you, right

      • soupuos@sopuli.xyz
        1·
        9 months ago

        Maybe it was just me, but I found VSCode’s undo/redo vim trees (u/r) to be kind of awkward when compared to real vim.

    • janabuggs@beehaw.org
      1·
      9 months ago

      Native vim? Or with an elaborate preference file?

      I personally have grown so accustomed to vim that if I have to ssh to a new (to me) server I would rather use stock vi (which in most systems is actually an alias for vim) to any other editor. But honestly I have made an alias for a script that ports over my elaborate vimrc file for every first login to a new server or instance lol. It makes me feel a little like a diva 💁💅

      • Novman@feddit.it
        2·
        9 months ago

        Vim with a minimal preference file, but sometimes vim only, i don’t like vi cause it lacks syntax highlighting

  • biscuitswalrus@aussie.zone
    13·
    9 months ago

    Quitting Vim is called ‘escaping’ because it was designed to be a trap and you’ve escaped. Congratulations to everyone who has.

  • phorq@lemmy.mlEspañol
    9·
    9 months ago

    Who told you to add a job to your root crontab? Vim was just protecting you from yourself

  • zorro@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    9 months ago

    I think someone else mentioned this but just run vimtutor in your command line for a pretty exhaustive tutorial.