is "vi" worth learning in 2022?

bakul said:
pay for one that shows the cheat sheet *only* when the mug is holding some hot liquid!
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Could be done with some kind of liquid crystal ink or so.
So then you *must* learn vi, because every time you need the cheat sheet you have to brew a coffee first, wait until the mug is heated enough, and have the job done before the coffee is cold again... ?
What about an espresso mug? Could only hold 'i', 'Esc', and 'ZZ'. Or you additionally need a magnifier glass.
(BS! ?)

The german comedian Horst Evers once told story very similar:
He faces the fact that his kitchen sink is always unusable because of all the dishes to be made filling it up constantly. Since he also always forgets all important pin-, social-security-, phone numbers, and passwords,
he printed those on a sheet of paper, sealed it waterproof, and glued it on the bottom of the sink.
So everytime he needs one of those numbers he have to do the dishes first.
Result was his kitchen sink still is unsable, but now he remembers all the numbers.

astyle said:
how many people out there are like that
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drhowarddrfine said:
just to see what it will do. Then start looking at the docs
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This can be summarized by:
People are either interested, or they are not.

Microsoft, Apple, and Google produce systems for people want to use computers but are not interested in them.
FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and also Linux (and others) are systems only for people interested in.
(I could elaborate that more, but then I'd produced another bog roll post on something you all know anyway. :cool:)

We seen it here on the forums a couple of times:
Someone (beancounters: not everyone joining FreeBSD) may got FreeBSD presumably because it makes him feel like a hacker, or to show off his friends by having a geek's system, and when he or she realizes it's not done with clicking on some fancy colorful flashing icons but seriously needs some learning, they are gone.

Almost everyone here act understanding, patiently by writing 'give it a shot! It's worth it.'
But in the end it leads all back to 'truely interested in' or not.
 
fmc000 said:
Totally useless for us left-handed people
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?
What about a thread collecting not only vi cheat sheets, but most extraordinary ones?
There are also kind of stencils you may print and cut out, and then put them on your keyboard.

I once had the idea to write a 'driver(?)'/profil for those programmable, color lighted button keyboards,
where when using vi(m) the illumination changes with the usage of vi(m).
E.g. when your are in command mode, only the valid command keys are illuminated red, and when in insert mode all keys are green, except 'Esc' still be red...
- but I learned vim quicker to use than to write such a thing.
So it was more like the funny story I told above ?
 
fmc000 said:
Totally useless for us left-handed people :)
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You misunderstood. That is the rare vi evangelist mug to promote vi to your coworkers, the extremely rare left handed edition!

Edit: I don't see a problem here, most of the time I drink with my left hand. That is because I have the mug left of the keyboard so it does not collide with the mouse. I have no problem using my left hand for this, so - where is the problem?
 
Rewind to page two, 2022:

meine said:
… a Vim cheatsheet, the one linked here is IMHO the best.

If you just need the basics of vi just use the man page or the attached 1995 sheet.

<https://forums.freebsd.org/attachments/vi_cheat_sheet-pdf.15319/>
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1725776132330.png
horseflesh said:
… "a computer is a bicycle for your mind." …
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bakul said:
My bias is to make things very easy for newbies (such as a bike with training wheels) but incentivize them to learn more professional tools (a racing bike). …
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jrm@ said:
Whenever I see an adult on a bicycle, I have hope for the human race. - H.G. Wells
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Me too. Word up, Bert.

I hope that we'll soon have three hundred million Google search results when seeing an escape from vi.

1725774620602.pngOne method is probably missing from Google. Here's a photo of me escaping from her:

I'm the one on the right, PMSL at Vi's futile attempts to stick her parasol in the spokes of the bicycle for my mind. On my way to see my sister Anne. She knows a thing or two about packages.

Code: 
root@mowa219-gjp4-transcend-freebsd:~ # pkg delete --yes -g 'FreeBSD-vi*'
Checking integrity... done (0 conflicting)
Deinstallation has been requested for the following 3 packages (of 0 packages in the universe):

Installed packages to be REMOVED:
        FreeBSD-vi: 14.1
        FreeBSD-vi-dbg: 14.1
        FreeBSD-vi-man: 14.1

Number of packages to be removed: 3

The operation will free 1 MiB.
[1/3] Deinstalling FreeBSD-vi-man-14.1...
[1/3] Deleting files for FreeBSD-vi-man-14.1: 100%
[2/3] Deinstalling FreeBSD-vi-dbg-14.1...
[2/3] Deleting files for FreeBSD-vi-dbg-14.1: 100%
[3/3] Deinstalling FreeBSD-vi-14.1...
[3/3] Deleting files for FreeBSD-vi-14.1: 100%
root@mowa219-gjp4-transcend-freebsd:~ # freebsd-version
14.1-RELEASE-p4
root@mowa219-gjp4-transcend-freebsd:~ #
 

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I'm left handed, and learned to touch type in Junior High School (now, I think it'd be middle school). I'm not sure why a left hander would find that useless, for me it isn't. (though by now, I know the main vi shortcuts that I use and wouldn't need a chart--for more unusual stuff I just web search how to do something that I'll probably only need once).
 
Try taking the mug with your left hand... and read what's written on the OPPOSITE side... It's the same issue we southpaws have with scissors, can openers and so on, everything is tought to be used by right-handed people (and rightfully so I would say, as we're just 10% of the people).

Usually it's not a big deal unless you pick the wrong detergent for your dishwasher or your washing machine because the main sticker is on the "wrong side".
 
... and Ned Flanders was so happy finding a set of left handed nun-tchakkos, he knocked himself out over it ...
 
blackbird9 said:
where?
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(more than one question mark don't make a question more asking, but may the writer look stupid *cough*)

Frankly, I don't know.
I use vim without a cheat sheet for many years.
I simply knew there are such mugs, duckduckgoed some picture of it, just to post it here as kind of a joke, and wouldn't have if I knew what I started with that... :rolleyes:

What about to use 'mug vi cheat sheet' as a phrase on some internet search machine?
Or try some internet shop directly?
Amazon may are exploiters, but you can buy (almost) everything there.
 
When learning vi, I made my own cheat sheets with my left hand, a canary yellow pad, and a pencil, then trimmed those cheat sheets with right handed scissors, and pinned them with pushpins to the corkboard bulletin board on the right side of my desk. It was littered with cheat sheets of all different kinds: ASCII, EBCDIC, terminal control codes, programming language keywords, and etc. We didn’t have GUI computers in our office until the late 80s. I worked in a paper oriented office. We sketched out our ideas and drew screen layouts on paper for 80x24 Hazeltine and Wyse 50 monochrome text monitors. Before we started working with “unixes” and vi, we had to correct mistakes by retyping the whole line, or, we took turns using the one Hazeltine terminal in our office that had a “line editor mode.“

In college, I wrote programs in pencil on “coding sheets” and typed them on IBM cards with a key punch machine, then printed them out on greenbar paper, tested and debugged them, in a process that would take days or weeks to write programs. After years of working like that, discovering and learning how to use vi was like taking a shower under a waterfall on a beautiful day. We loved it and couldn’t get enough of it. :)
 
richardtoohey2 said:
Pencils, eh, fancy! In my day we chiselled instructions into stone tablets! ;)

I'll see myself out!
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kpedersen said:
Hah, mere children!

In my day, the universe was still sufficiently primordial that "stones" didn't exist yet. We would arrange hydrogen atoms to give us a general reminder. Things have only regressed since!
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I’m in awe that you ancient gentlemen were able to foresee the invention of vi from preclassical antiquity so many millennia ago. Wow. Amazing.
 
kpedersen said:
Hah, mere children!

In my day, the universe was still sufficiently primordial that "stones" didn't exist yet. We would arrange hydrogen atoms to give us a general reminder. Things have only regressed since!
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In my day, the mere existence of hydrogen atoms was a foreign concept, let alone any kind of organizing them. But now I look around - it's still a foreign concept to the masses... ?
 
tingo said:
It's 2024 now. Time to close this thread?
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Is Vi worth learning in 2000? Yes

Is Vi worth learning in spaceyear 2083? Yes

I think having threads like this is a good statement that decent software is timeless. Better still is that the alternatives often cited in these kinds of thread are often long since dead which makes it an even stronger argument.

Anyway, I look forward to discussing the exact same thing with everyone in another decade. Lets see if they have indeed managed to maintain WebKit's API stability enough to keep VSCode viable. Only time will tell :)
 
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