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submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[-] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

POV: You open vim for the first time.

Screenshot of vim start screen. The instruction to exit vim is highlighted in red. It reads: VIM - Vi IMproved version 9.1.697 by Bram Moolenaar et al. Modified by team+vim@tracker.debian.org Vim is open source and freely distributable Help poor children in Uganda! type :help iccf for information type :q to exit type :help or  for on-line help type :help version9 for version info

[-] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Fair, but there's a worse experience possible.

For a time, many people's first encounter with vi was when it auto-opened a temporary editor to ask them to submit a commit message for the git command they just ran.

This experience skips the vi "welcome" screen, because a file is open.

As a bonus challenge, git did not inform the user what editor is in use, and the user had no particular reason to even expect an editor to appear, based on what they were just doing.

None of this was the fault of vi, really. But it was a terrible introduction.

It got better when various operating systems changed their default command line editor to nano, and git added some helpful adjustments - "if certain settings are not configured, assume a new user and show verbose welcome messages".

[-] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago
[-] [email protected] -3 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

The image shows the last state of a terminal emulator of person without command line or git knowledge. The person attempted to run git commit and is now blaming the result of a specific configuration on their system that launches a vi derivative on the vi derivative itself. This image is expected to convince the viewer that the vi derrivative is to blame.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

You cannot expect people to read, it's unreasonable.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

I mean, there are blind users.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

I hope the accessibility program to read the screen can read this.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago

I've heard they can be spotty, although I'm personally sighted. That's usually the reason people post transcripts, anyway.

this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2025
122 points (96.9% liked)

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