this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2025

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Programmer Humor

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Vim is built different (lemmy.nz)

submitted 1 year ago by yogthos@lemmy.ml to c/programmerhumor@lemmy.ml

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[–] barubary@infosec.exchange 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

POV: You open vim for the first time.

![Screenshot of vim start screen. The instruction to exit vim is highlighted in red. It reads:

VIM - Vi IMproved

version 9.1.697 by Bram Moolenaar et al. Modified by team+vim@tracker.debian.org Vim is open source and freely distributable

Help poor children in Uganda! type :help iccf for information

type :q to exit type :help or for on-line help type :help version9 for version info](https://lemmy.nz/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.infosec.exchange%2Finfosec.exchange%2Fmedia_attachments%2Ffiles%2F114%2F654%2F520%2F326%2F340%2F201%2Foriginal%2F3df1e7f1fb9b8619.png)

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

More like:

[–] simontherockjohnson@lemmy.ml -2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The image shows the last state of a terminal emulator of person without command line or git knowledge. The person attempted to run git commit and is now blaming the result of a specific configuration on their system that launches a vi derivative on the vi derivative itself. This image is expected to convince the viewer that the vi derrivative is to blame.

[–] ZeroHora@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You cannot expect people to read, it's unreasonable.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean, there are blind users.

[–] ZeroHora@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I hope the accessibility program to read the screen can read this.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 year ago

I've heard they can be spotty, although I'm personally sighted. That's usually the reason people post transcripts, anyway.

[–] pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Fair, but there's a worse experience possible.

For a time, many people's first encounter with vi was when it auto-opened a temporary editor to ask them to submit a commit message for the git command they just ran.

This experience skips the vi "welcome" screen, because a file is open.

As a bonus challenge, git did not inform the user what editor is in use, and the user had no particular reason to even expect an editor to appear, based on what they were just doing.

None of this was the fault of vi, really. But it was a terrible introduction.

It got better when various operating systems changed their default command line editor to nano, and git added some helpful adjustments - "if certain settings are not configured, assume a new user and show verbose welcome messages".

[–] SneakyWeasel@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 year ago

This....this hits way to close to home.

[–] Outwit1294@lemmy.today 5 points 1 year ago

I have accidentally opened it so many times. I have to look how to close it every time

[–] HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

vim & sleep 30 && killall -TERM vim

[–] princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

POV: you opened ed for the first time

?
help
?
?
?
quit
?
exit
?
bye
?
hello?
?
eat flaming death
?
^C
?
^C
?
^D
?

[–] JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

^C
^\
^Z
kill -9 (from another session)

If I can’t kill the child process, I kill its parent and go on with my life.

[–] princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 year ago

Sure, but the above is from a gnu humour post that's over 30 years old: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

[+] masterspace@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] lagoon8622@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Are you guys actual programmers? What's wrong with using Vim for development?

[+] masterspace@lemmy.ca -6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] lagoon8622@sh.itjust.works 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You don't grok vi.

That's fine and you don't need to. But don't knock it if you haven't even taken time to learn it.

Yesterday I needed to insert a tab character on every line from 2 to 31,000 something. I made the line selection keystrokes in Cursor - it immediately crashed so hard I had to restart my PC.

Vim did it in a few milliseconds.

[–] wetbeardhairs@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 year ago

Oh. I'm going to go practice some of that now. Thanks for the link.

[+] masterspace@lemmy.ca -4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

[deleted]

[–] exu@feditown.com 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You always have to learn the processes in a new company, this is just part of that. And if they don't give you the explanations, training and time to learn, that's a good sign you wouldn't want to be at this company.

Maybe also speak to some of your new colleagues, whether they had similar trouble and see if you can improve the process for the next person.

[–] lagoon8622@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You can learn enough Vim to be productive in it in about 3 minutes.

You can install some plugins; your experienced coworkers have probably figured that out for you.

It's ok to be a junior, but you should investigate things from time to time. You may even surprise yourself.

But you do you.

[–] sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 year ago

I'm a vim novice. I basically know just enough to save files or quit, paste with formatting, and "insert" changes. I think I used to know how to find within a file, and I'm sure I could learn again in an instant, but I haven't had to do that in a long time for my noobish tasks. I know it is way more capable than that, but I haven't had to learn more features yet since I use it at a 'nano' level.

I agree it only takes 3 minutes to learn these things, but personally it took me a bit longer to make them muscle memory.

I get it if someone were to be annoyed that things they knew how to do in another program they had to re-learn in vim, but this kind of thing it seems like you would just accept that you're going to be frustrated and then put in the work to learn it so you can work more easily with your coworkers or whatever. Like you said, vim has serious advantages, and it seems a little short sighted to not be willing to learn from people that want to train you up in a tool to be more effective.

[–] expr@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

Vscode definitely can't handle large files like vim can. I can open files that are multiple GBs in vim without issue. Vscode definitely cannot.

[–] expr@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

What do you mean "build our dev environments around vim"? If you mean they write dev tooling in vimscript and explicitly require everyone to use it, I actually agree with you. I don't believe employers should really ever force any particular editor or IDE if the work is getting done. I would be equally annoyed by a workplace forcing me to use vscode instead of vim. It would slow me down way too much.

If you are just complaining that they build dev tooling as a CLI, hard disagree. That is absolutely what dev tooling should use because it's actually universal and can be used regardless of your editor choice.

At my workplace, our dev tooling is done via CLI and our developers use vim, emacs, and vscode. Because it's all CLI, it's easy for individual developers to add their own scripts to automate parts of their workflow as they see fit (and if such automations are deemed useful by the group at large, it will get merged into our shared devtools repo). We even have some editor-specific stuff in there people have written that they find useful, but it's entirely optional.