I feel like the images should be switched.
When you know how to exit, you just slap your face 🤦 and ask “why… why, please, why don’t they add new shortcuts 🤦!”.
Lol if you know how to exit, you may know that you actually can change almost everything about vim.
I don’t think you can add modifier keys in shortcuts.
And this behavior should come out of the box, not me changing stuff around so I can make it usable. For something that I use all the time, sure, but I only use a terminal text editor with git, and I don’t use git that often. For everything else, I use a GUI text editor (mousepad, leafpad, whatever).
nnoremap <C-q> :q<CR>
This works for me to bind control+q to quit.
edit: easier to upload an image because lemmy is eating the “html” characters
Hm, will try that. If it works, I’m buying you a beer 🍺.
You can set which editor to use with git using the GIT_EDITOR environment variable instead of telling other people their editor isn’t usable by your standards.
Yes, I know, and I have it set to nano, but even then, I don’t use nano that much anyway, I do most edits in a GUI text editor.
IDK, I exit vim and promptly fall asleep.
Likewise 👍.
If you wanna save changes: :wq
If not: :q!
Else: :SpanishInquisition
Hmm, I didn’t expect that last one.
Why do so many people prefer :wq over :x?
Cause I don’t like to think about my x
:xwas a gamechanger. And it doesn’t update the file’s modify date if you made no changes.Sometimes I just sit back and think about all that saved time and effort so much that I have actually lost time by switching from
:wq.why not?
There is a other option?
I did not expect the Spanish inquisition!
help! i wanna leave!
:wq
why isn’t it working???You have been chosen by the Vim Dommy Mommy. You cannot leave.
:ggdGwq (please don’t do this)
VIM Golf… Same outcome, fewer strokes:
%d|wq
I use Vim daily, and i have absolutely no clue what that command would do, what would it do? Delete the document, save and quit?
exactly.
gg -> go to top of document
d -> delete (actually, it’s cut, but it destroys the mnemonic)
G -> here is a modifier to “d” and tells it do “delete until end of document”
w -> write current state of buffer to disk
q -> exit program
gg
Huh… I always just used :1
ggdGZZ
This actually does what you intend to do. On nvim atleast.
ZZ/ZQ.
I am also a shift-zz fan.
:x
ZZ
Serious question. Why? No, for real, why? Why are these hard to understand editors still the default on most distros and flavors? Why haven’t they reinvented themselves with easier to understand shortcuts?
I get the feeling my comment will attract heat, but I’m a web dev, studied comp Sci for years, have worked for nearly a decade and have spent over half my 30 year old life using computers of all sorts. I’m by no means a genius and I by no means know enough about this or most tech subjects, but I literally only knew how to close vim with and without saving changes in a recent vim encounter, purely due to a meme I saw in this community a few days prior, and I had already forgotten the commands by the time I saw this post. Nothing about vim and alternatives feels intuitive or easy to use, and you may say it’s a matter of sitting down and learning, which you can argue that, but you can’t argue this isn’t a bit of a gatekeeper for people trying to dip their toes into anything that could eventually rely on opening vim to do something.
I won’t try to deny its place in computer history, or its use for many, or even that it is preferred by some, but when every other software with keyboard shortcuts agrees on certain easy to remember standards, I don’t quite understand how software that goes against all of that hasn’t been replaced or hasn’t reinvented itself in newer versions.
Then again, I have no idea what the difference between vi, vim, emacs, and nano are, so roast away!
Vi is meant for old school and modern terminals. Ctrl+S or Ctrl+C had very particular purposes in software control flow. With Vi you can communicate via SSH on almost any unix file system. It’s basically a universal editor that doesn’t require a mouse or a lot of keys on a keyboard. You can get away with just a subset of the ASCII set.
So for one, it’s kind of like having a backwards compatible piece of software that exists on almost any system you might need to remotely control via a keyboard with no GUI.
For two, once you do learn how to use Vi/Vim/Emacs, you’ll be far faster at typing. It has several useful tricks for automating typing (faster copy/paste, copy/paste n-times, jump around lines/chars, go-to lines, search via Regex, etc.) which are particularly useful in a programming context.
Generally, it’s worth a developer spending at least a day or a week typing only in Vi for programming. Yes, you’ll be slow and clunky. But the moment you have to SSH into a server and make meaningful changes to a file, you’ll be happy you spent the time.
Ctrl+Q was also in use back then to restart the Ctrl+S flow control IIRC
Then again, I have no idea what the difference between vi, vim, emacs, and nano are, so roast away!
Lol. Git Gud, Noob.
Why would vim reinvent itself? Vim’s functionality has been standard for years, and works as expected. You can always use nano or something similar instead, which is probably a lot more usable to someone who doesn’t want to learn all the advanced functionality of vim or emacs
Some people like vim the way it is. That’s why they haven’t re-invented it. If you want to use a more intuitive text editor, there are plenty available (such as nano or micro).They don’t need to turn vim into a clone of something that already exists.
As for why it’s still the default… It’s the same reason why everybody uses QWERTY keyboards when Dvorak is clearly superior. People already know how to type with QWERTY and they don’t want to take the time to re-learn with a new layout, change their workflows, etc.
It isn’t universal, though. Garuda Linux defaults to micro. The web dev boot camp I was in didn’t bring vim up at all! We only used nano! I think that was a disservice to the students, but the instructors must’ve thought that it would be too confusing.
Dvorak is clearly superior? Prove it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=188fipF-i5I
This video goes over a lot of metrics about how far you have to move your fingers to type certain things, and how we wound up at qwerty in the first place. The truth of it is though: different layouts are better for different things. He shows in the video a bunch of keyboard layouts optimized for things like youtube comments, the script of the Bee movie, wikipedia, etc.
At 7:12 in the video, he cites Dvorak as 26.2% more efficient than qwerty for how much your fingers need to travel to type. This covers letter frequency, but also sequencing (ie, typing the letters “un” on qwerty means i have go from top row U to bottom row N with the same finger).
I don’t use dvorak, because if I want to use someone else’s computer, I don’t want to have to fight with muscle memory, but it is “superior” in many ways.
The main downside of Dvorak and why I will never use it is that virtually all programs designed their keyboard shortcuts around the positions of QWERTY keys and remapping literally everything makes no sense.
One word: ergonomics.
With Dvorak, the most commonly-used letters are on the home row. In fact, all of the vowels are on the home row.
The most common letter in English is E, and QWERTY makes you reach for it. You know what IS on the home row? Fuckin’ semicolon! Can you even remember the last time you used a semicolon?
I spend a lot of time at work sitting, so I’d rather have a comfortable chair than an uncomfortable chair. Same with my keyboard: I’d rather have a comfortable layout than an uncomfortable one. Less risk of repetitive strain injury, too.
Can you even remember the last time you used a semicolon?
Database Administrators have entered the chat.
Is
vistill the default? On Debian it sure isn’t,nanois the default and has been for years, and I can only assume the debian derivatives have all followed suit. That’d already be most new installs taken care of.If you find something that opens
viunexpectedly, double-check$EDITOR’s value then file a bug report and tell them to follow$EDITOR.Just to add to that some programs also use their own variable like GIT_EDITOR, SVN_EDITOR,…
As a ~20 year vim user, and by no means a proficient power user (any time I end up in recording mode, I just mash ESC repeatedly until this start behaving normally again.), I think it’s just “it’s easier for someone that doesn’t know how to use it to learn, than it is for everyone that already knows how to use it to relearn”.
Like the damn scroll options on laptop trackpads. Multitouch scroll down = scroll down. Then someone decided it needed to match the way phone scrolling works after smartphones became popular, so now there’s lots of scroll down = scroll up software behavior. But the options are still there to behave neither way. If you don’t like the vim commands, you’re free to install something that behaves in a way that you expect. If you do like vim commands, install it and get the behavior that users have come to expect for the last 20+ years.
To ensure the Unix-like standard of maximum backwards compatibility. Vi (the original, before Vim) was made in an age where computer keyboards might not have had luxury features like arrow keys, but did have alphanumeric keys and minimally competent users. It has worked for almost half a century, so unless you’re Microsoft, why would you change it?
Even today, many people prefer it because you don’t have to move your hand far away from the home row while typing or navigating, and the modality gives the user a much greater toolkit (seriously, I just about nutted when I discovered
d i "). Not having to rely on modifiers and the arrow keys also reduces the risk of the repeated stress injury known as Emacs pinky.Nano is the default on Debian for more than a decade. Maybe two. I don’t think vim is the default on any largely use distro now.
Are you actually asking why people use them?
Because vim (and emacs too!) is a powerful editor that works purely on command line and most people who are experienced in the Unix world are generally familiar with it. There are plenty of easier editors to use, like nano, that are also widely distributed and you are free to change your default. Being really powerful but you kind of need to know what you’re doing is basically unix’s whole thing.
I guess some people really like the features. Imo Micro/Nano are much easier to use than Vim
i mean… skill issue 🤷
:qa!
Ctrl+Alt+F2rebootI’ve never understood people arguing about terminal text editors like nano and vim. Why not just use a GUI text editor like gedit?
I’m not the most Linux savvy but when I ssh onto a work machine I’ll use a terminal editor instead of copying the file onto a local machine, editing the file in a GUI and then overwriting the file on the remote machine
I thought you could just open the file in a GUI without copying it manually, just type
gedit path/to/file.extension
sshing only gives you access to CLI
