is "vi" worth learning in 2022?

scottro said:
In my anecdotal experience, it seems that the most of "This is in the info page" stuff comes at the beginning, not the end, of a typical manpage. But I could easily be wrong
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groff_mdoc(7) includes a man page template.

This differs from the example in the FreeBSD Documentation Project Primer for New Contributors.

Also,

sko said:
… /usr/share/examples/mdoc/. …
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Postscript, somewhat outdated:

forums.freebsd.org

HowTo: Create a manpage from scratch.

Creating a manpage from scratch. What is a manpage? The FreeBSD documentation manuals system is comprised on many manuals that are intended to by displayed on-line from the command line using the “man†command. Every Base RELEASE command has it’s own manual as well as the...
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org
 
Well, good and consistent documentation does take a lot of effort to maintain. I guess it does take some discipline to not say "I am too lazy to learn how to maintain manpages, there are technical shortcomings in the entire infrastructure of manpage creation, I'll go my separate way and start documenting the software in a weird way that forces everyone to learn a new workflow, whether they like it or not."

Kind of an unfortunate reality of working in Open Source - everybody can see the good, the bad, and the ugly side of putting in the effort to conform to standards.

?
 
astyle said:
… I guess it does take some discipline to not say "I am too lazy to learn how to maintain manpages, …
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My interest in mdoc grew after I resigned. Then came October 2023 pull request 857, commits for which were made a few months later.

I don't know why the subsequent bectl(8) page for 14.1-RELEASE lacks the HISTORY and AUTHORS details that are present for CURRENT. Also, there remain the four references to non-existent beadm(1), which I fixed. Postscripts:
  • maybe not entirely cherry-picked because I didn't suggest an MFC (no mention of MFC in the FDP primer, but I should have thought of it)
  • the FreeBSD Ports 14.1 web page for beadm(1) might be a source of confusion (its section changed from 1 to 8 in 2020).

I guess the changes will reach RELEASE in December 2025.
 
Yeah, and this is FreeBSD - Linux is an even worse mess when it comes to documentation consistency from one distro to next, from one version to next, even for basic stuff like userland utils that are supposed to ship with the kernel. ?
 
I've only ever used nano on Linux, and thought I was in for a fun time with ee on FreeBSD; turns out it's just as-easy :p

I haven't felt the need to use a more-advanced cli editor yet, and the few surprise visits to vi with sudo -e I had have me really not into trying to learn vi when I had to go to a web search to exit it! As long as I can copy/paste and find text I'm good.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
These statements about the inability to figure out that :q quits vi are exhausting and bewildering.
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I'm sorry, what part of this looks obvious at all how to close vi, never mind even operating it? :p

Screenshot_2024-09-07_08-23-54.png
 
Argentum said:
Code: 
:q!
if you do not want to save the changes :p or ZZ if you want to save.
In fact this is not ironic. One has to read manuals and possibly make a cheat-sheet when beginning.
vi(1)
ex(1)
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Yeah I might have been spoiled starting out with nano on Ubuntu and just have the expectancy of cli text editors being simple. Learning vi or something else early-on might have been a good idea, but I've been fine for years with nano :p And even ee seems to offer the same functionality that I used nano for.

But when staring at a fullscreen black and white terminal, I'd rather spend time learning the OS before a text editor :p
 
drhowarddrfine said:
Espionage724 How many programs do you start and hope to be effective with while not reading how to use it and with no understanding? You just open the program and hope to be immediately productive?
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Uh, plenty. And yeah :p

I haven't used PowerPoint since high school and managed to open up Libre-whatever, make some slides, and export to pdf within a few minutes no problem on a whim, no manuals required.

I wanted a new ebook reader on GNOME; I found Foliate. Didn't read a thing about how it worked, and it opened a book.
 
Espionage724 said:
I haven't felt the need to use a more-advanced cli editor yet, and the few surprise visits to vi with sudo -e I had have me really not into trying to learn vi when I had to go to a web search to exit it! As long as I can copy/paste and find text I'm good.
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If you don't need an advanced editor learning one including vi(m) was wasted effort.
If you need one I recommend to learn a good one: vi(m), emacs, geany,... there are others.
No powerful tool has an 'obivious usage' but must be learned.
Otherwise it may be easy to use, but not efficient/powerful.

You don't have to like vi(m) (like e.g. me really loving vim)
but if you use any kind of unix(y) system you'd be advised best to at least know the very basic commands of vi:
'i', or 'a', [Esc], and :q!, :qw, or 'ZZ' - can't be that hard to remember those few commands; or at least have some cheat sheet ready to hand, cause vi is the de facto default editor on unix(y) systems (and not really that bad, but really good, if you stop to refuse it, but are open to it and give it a shot.)
1725720290698.png
 
Espionage724 said:
Uh, plenty. And yeah :p

I haven't used PowerPoint since high school and managed to open up Libre-whatever, make some slides, and export to pdf within a few minutes no problem on a whim, no manuals required.

I wanted a new ebook reader on GNOME; I found Foliate. Didn't read a thing about how it worked, and it opened a book.
Click to expand...

And I'm sure you did a lot more stumbling and fumbling doing that than you would have learning how to quit vi.
 
Cath O'Deray said:
Impossible to read the cheat sheet through my grey beard. Sorry.
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:rolleyes: there are zillions of vi cheat sheets on the internet,
this was ment as some kind of an idea to have a cheat sheet always ready by hand, cause there are also several mugs with a vi cheat sheet printed on - this picture wasn't ment to be read, especially not through a beard... ?
 
drhowarddrfine said:
Espionage724 How many programs do you start and hope to be effective with while not reading how to use it and with no understanding? You just open the program and hope to be immediately productive?
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You'll be surprised at how many people out there are like that. No, they are not computer geeks like us, they simply prioritize their time for stuff other than RTFMing. Try making your boss (or a 6-year-old) RTFM... they'll just throw a tantrum and leave. You can also take a look at the demographics that glamorize the iPhone - these people won't bother, either.

For people like that, it's probably best to ask if they're willing to spend some time RTFMing. If they are - great. If not - it's probably better to let it go. That is their decision to make, not yours. You can only do a sales job about the benefits of RTFM-ing, that's it.

In these Forums, telling others to RTFM is the norm for conversation and information sharing. But AFK - other rules of etiquette apply.
 
astyle A lot of us, me included, will start up a new program just to see what it will do. Then start looking at the docs to delve deeper if we're interested. And really read through the manual if we want to become experts. When one has no interest in diving into the manuals then one has no interest in becoming an expert. I'm not sure what one would be called if they can't even look at the manual at all.
 
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