Very cool, if true

Cheers!

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dougs.livejournal.com

And look at the manual pages for vi(1) or vim(1), which is the editor you've been given.

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drplokta

I think

dougs knows vi(m), but not git. The commit message should go at the beginning of the file, not the end, so ignore the first line of these instructions.

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dougs.livejournal.com

The doctor's diagnosis is quite correct, and you should rely on his instructions.

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khbrown.livejournal.com

:wq is the only vi command I remembered from this and thus my favourite. Emacs was a bit easier.

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alextfish.livejournal.com

This looks like Emacs to me. The Emacs keyboard controls are indeed somewhat obscure if you're not used to them. (The other major category of Unix text editors is the VI family, Gvim and so on. Their keyboard controls are just as obscure, and holy wars are fought over which is less obscure.) There are a few useful quick-reference sheets available with a Google or two, but the controls you want are:

C-x C-s (which is Emacsese for Ctrl-x Ctrl-s): Save
C-x C-c: Quit
C-_ (Ctrl-underscore, usually Ctrl-shift-minus): Undo

There are many more. It's quite powerful once you get used to it: it has a "kill ring" which is like an indefinitely large clipboard history, and so on.

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alextfish.livejournal.com

...And now I see the window is titled "VIM", so... yeah. That's the VI family, so go with dougs's advice. But oh well, if you ever find yourself in Emacs and don't know what to do, then the above may be useful :)

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ajr.livejournal.com

This looks like Emacs to me.

Looks more like VI to me, seeing as it says "VIM" in the title bar and all.

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skington.livejournal.com

Ctrl-minus works just as well, at least in stock Debian installs of Emacs.

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Ok, managed to find a setting in the gitconfig and do this:
editor = 'c:/Program Files (x86)/TextPad 5/TextPad.exe'

And now I get a text editor with shortcut keys that I know.

Hurrah!

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drplokta

Better still, do 'git commit -am "message"', and you won't have to use an editor at all.

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Aha, that will be useful! Thank you!

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That's probably vi.

It's a POS.

Glad you got help onto something decent.

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vim is very, very far from a pos. But using it to type a single-line commit message is like hiring the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra en masse because you want someone to hit a triangle.

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I don't think I've used vim. But it has the same crack-headed interface that belongs either in the 1970s or the bin -- take your pick.

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autopope.livejournal.com

It's not crack-headed if it's wired into your fingertips and you learned to use it on a serial terminal more than 20 years ago ... Like me. Or if you want an extensible editor only barely less powerful than GNU emacs that is scriptable in languages over than lisp. And modern vim has GUI bindings so your preferred finger-macros should work -- google for CREAM and Vim.

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Just because you can wire something into your fingers does not make it sane or sensible or usable. Look at Rachmaninov.

And things like vi and emacs are just a social marker now -- you're a l33t hacker because you master them, and so vice versa. But that doesn't make them good either.

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It's definitely *not* just a social marker thing. There are a lot of features (regexes, bracket matching, editing *REALLY BIG* files) that Vim, Emacs and a couple of other editors handle better than the rest.

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Regexes and bracket matching I've certainly used on GUI editors -- TextEdit on Windows and TextMate on OS X. Whether linux has something up to that standard I don't know. Really big files -- depends how big. I have previously opened a database dump (accidentally) in TextMate and it was slow but didn't choke.

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khbrown.livejournal.com

Depends on which regexes you know or learned first I would say - understanding Perl regexes isn't much use in Emacs without having a copy of Mastering Regular Expressions or similar to translate between them.

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I don't actually know anything about Emacs regexes, so I'll take your word for it. (For some reason my workplace is about 90% Vi(m), 10% Emacs (if that) so I have only others' word that Emacs is as powerful as Vim).

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... if it's wired into your fingertips ...
I started using vi about fifteen years ago, when I was working on a project on a system (a turquoise pizza-box SGI Indy) which had no other full-screen text editor installed. By the time the project finished, I was used to it (as you say, it was wired into my fingertips) and I carried on using it for preference, because I could pretty much guarantee that it would be available on any Unix-like system I was ever likely to find myself using.

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You mean, like Unix?

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What

autopope said. There's only so many interface options when you're creating a text editor and want it to be usable in terminal mode - Vi(m) has a far better interface than Emacs, the only real competitor (pico/nano is more intuitive, but that's because you can't do very much with it).

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When I need a terminal editor, yes, I use nano because like you said, it's intuitive and doesn't leave you stuck on a cryptic interface where you're clueless what to do.

But the only times I need a terminal editor is when I'm ssh-ing into a server and in those situations I'm firefighting, so I need only the essentials, and also in a UI that I don't have to fight.

Any other time, there are now decent, modern text editors available ;)

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See, I've spent much of the last three years working on either cut-down versions of GNU/Linux, running in a buggy emulator, sometimes on machines 6000 miles away, or hacked together versions of OpenSolaris, running in an even more buggy emulator, or development versions of AIX with unstable kernels and no X. And I have to try to get perl scripts running on these things.
When your only options are vim or ed, vim starts looking a lot nicer ;)

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dougs is exactly right - and his advice works for vi as well as vim, and is The Right Way. But if you ever find yourself in vim again, all you need to know is:
arrow keys work as you'd expect, as does delete.
Backspace only works in interactive mode.
To get into interactive mode and start typing, type i
To stop typing again, hit Esc
To write your changes to the file and close, once you've hit Esc, type :wq

That doesn't allow you to get particularly good use out of Vim, but it's easy to remember and does allow you to type, delete, save and quit.

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Or, to get out of it without causing any damage:
<esc>:q!<return>

<esc> puts you into command mode, : gives you a command prompt, and q! means "quit without saving or asking me about it".

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Yes, and AAAAAAAAAARGH.
I can just about see that esc is a logical choice. But why the fuck a colon after that? I mean, fucking WHY? Which fuckhead designed it, really, that's what I want to know. And then, yknow, give them a good kicking.

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Unless someone's actually forcing you to use vi, then this would seem like something of an over-reaction. Perhaps there are more worthwhile things you could be channelling that time and effort into.

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When other systems like git drop you into it, then effectively, one is forced to use it.

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Most Unix-based utilities default to vi as their full-screen editor, for the simple reason that it's pretty much guaranteed to be there, whereas things like emacs or pico might not be. Almost all such utilities check the environment variables EDITOR and VISUAL first, and use whatever they're set to, only falling back to vi in the absence of any explicit instructions. So if you set them to point to your preferred editor, then you need never have to use vi again.

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Oh, also: Fifty Ways to Leave Your Editor.

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Ouch!

From:

despotliz.livejournal.com

I was told that the best way to get a random string of text in Unix is to sit a novice in front of vi and get them to try and exit...

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That doesn't surprise me at all!

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A friend of mine (the late, sadly missed

blue_condition) once had a problem with inconsiderate colleagues remotely logging into the unix workstation on his desk, and hogging local resources (cpu, disk space, etc). So he de-installed or otherwise locked down all text editing software (including vi, ed, ex and so on) leaving only TECO available. Which only he, amongst his colleagues, knew how to use. I believe they got the message reasonably quickly.

From:

drdoug.livejournal.com

I remember that story! It's the companion in my mind to the one where

steer ill-advisedly badmouthed vi to

minusbat, who promptly rooted

steer's machine and (obfuscatedly) replaced his favoured editor with a script that simply called his favoured editor six days a week, but once a week displayed the message:
friday is vi day
... and started vi instead.

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Oh, that's fantastic.

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