I’m trying out Obsidian for taking notes, and this made me laugh.
Funny, but unironically a pretty good idea.
One of my first computer jobs was working in a student computer lab at my undergraduate university. This was back in the mid 90s-ish.
We had three types of computers - windows machines running 3.1 or whatever was current then, Macs who would all do a Wild Eep together when they rebooted en masse, and Sun X Windows dumb terminals that were basically just (obviously) unix machines for all intents and purposes. This was back when there were basically like 5 websites total, and people still hadn’t heard of Mosaic.
So everyone wanted the windows and Mac boxes, and only took the xterms when there was nothing else open. I was the primary support person for them since none of the other people wanted to learn Unix and I was the only CS major.
The X boxes suffered from two main learning hurdles. One was that backspaces were incorrectly mapped into some escape key sequence, and the other is that it would drop you from (I think) pine into emacs as a mail editor as soon as you hit it. 90% of my time was telling people how to exit emacs. It was that, putting more paper into the printers, and teaching myself more programming than I was learning in classes.
My god that brought back memories. The first commands when sitting at a new terminal was always, always:
stty sane
stty erase '^H'
It was well into the 2000s before Unix had useable defaults.
God, I remember the backspace thing. I hope whoever allowed a computer to be shipped in that condition got fired.
Why would I want to exit vim?
Tricky question, but I think I have a solution:
:!readlink /proc/$PPID/fd/* | grep “$(dirname %)/.$(basename %).sw” | xargs -I{} rm “{}” ; kill -9 $PPID
If anyone needs the command: :q!
If you want the computer to ask if you’re sure: :q
If you want to save: :wq
nano crew where you at
hopefully switching to micro
I made that switch a few months ago just so I could cut, copy and paste without having to lookup how to do it. it’s been great.
A lot of my personal dislike for VIM would be done away with if it just had a helpful common keys cheat sheet (basic cursor navigation, edit mode, exit with and without saving, etc) at the bottom of the editor window like Nano does.
Really, I’d just recommend using nano then. It’s installed basically anywhere you can find vim and works perfectly fine as a text editor! To use vim effectively it has a learning curve no matter what, so it’s not necessarily meant for everyone.
I understand where you’re coming from, but as a frequent user of vim I’d much rather have the additional line of text.
It should be default on, with a setting to turn it off for power users
They could even have one of the commands on the cheatsheet be to hide it, so anyone who doesn’t want it will immediately see how to turn it off.