On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 10:03:12AM -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Fri, 2020-06-26 at 12:58 -0400, Neil Horman wrote:
> > From this thread you can find at least two people (me and Ben
> > Rosser)
> > who definitely didn't keep using vi (my very next questions were
> > "what's an easier editor to use?" and "how do I change the
default
> > editor to something else?"), and are still sufficiently frazzled by
> > the
> > experience that we still refuse to. :P
> Right, and I acutally think thats great. You had a problem, you
> asked the
> questions you needed answers to, and solved your problem. I
> personally think
> the process of identifying whats bothering you, figuring out a
> solution (by
> asking questions, getting answers and experimenting), and then
> implementing your
> fix is actually a pretty good user experience in and of itself
> (though that may
> just be me). :)
That is not how it felt at the time :P
It's really the point about Unexpected Forcible Learning. If I sit down
at my computer and think "right, I'm going to learn to do X", that's
one thing. I am mentally prepared to spend some time stumbling around
working out how to do X.
The problem with this experience is that's not how it happens. You
don't sit down and thinking "today I'm going to learn how to use vi"
or
"today I'm going to learn about console text editors and the $EDITOR
variable". You were intending to do something else, and you were
suddenly sandbagged by this fracking weird thing you have no idea what
it is that got in the way of the something else you were trying to do.
Yes, eventually you learn something, but it's not a "pretty good user
experience", it is a frustrating and annoying one.
/me puts a tinfoil hat on
what if... what IF ... this whole "vi by default" is a huge conspiracy by
the emacs people to make new users hate vi from the earliest stages, thus
providing a welcoming environment for them to swoop in and save them with
promises of strange shortcuts! I knew it all along!
/me completely wraps himself in tinfoil [1]
[1] well, aluminium foil because it's too hard to get decent tinfoil these
days, not like back in my days when it was snowing uphill both ways