8 ms·

I met my wife because she was stuck in VI. I was a unix sysadmin in the early 90s, and she was a grad student. She came to me for help (like most of the 1st y

• chpmrc 9y ago
  THIS is the "How I met your mother" we want.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • diminish 9y ago
    And I met mine, while she needed help trying to copy paste in emacs. IDE users, you're doomed to stay single!
    • iheartmemcache 9y ago
      And to this very day, little Johnny, I thank the heavens that the sysop hadn't put CUA-mode into the /etc/skel/.emacs/init.el.
    • NTripleOne 9y ago
      Fine by me, that's more time I can spend not having to read manuals to use a text editor. :^)
    • brianpan 9y ago
      Isn't emacs an IDE? :)
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • tomcam 9y ago
      I love both of the above stories. Mine is not quite as good. My wife was assigned to test my code (Microsoft's CodeView debugger ported to other processors), and one of the reasons she married me was that it didn't introduce new bugs.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• anubisresources 9y ago
  Vim brings people together!
• yongjik 9y ago
  "So how did you meet your wife?" "She badly needed an escape, and I showed her the way." ...sorry, terrible pun.
  • BurningFrog 9y ago
    At least you didn't use "Feleventh Heaven".
• iamacynic 9y ago
  it's per se.
• rbanffy 9y ago
  ... and people complain about Apple's touchbar...
• 6502nerdface 9y ago
  Interesting, wonder what the reasoning was for folding ESC into F11. Did ctrl-[ work, too?
  • kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
    I'd venture that F1-F10 were more commonly used across various systems and F11+ were bonus keys.
  • jclulow 9y ago
    It did, in fact. I have a VT220 on my desk at work.
• photojosh 9y ago
  Best meeting story ever. I met my wife in a physics lecture, and she credits me with her sticking with engineering, but your tale is better. Important question: did she end up learning vi after that?
  • drewg123 9y ago
    She already knew vi. Probably better than I did, as she'd done her undergrad at MIT, and already knew unix. But she just didn't know that F11 was ESC on those DEC keyboards. It was labelled and all, but it was nowhere near where ESC is normally on a keyboard.
    • kaspiCZ 9y ago
      Or a plot twist...she knew all along! (but I guess you already asked her)
    • dkersten 9y ago
      I assume that ^C and ^[ are vim and not vi? Or, at the very least, later additions, I guess.
• monochromatic 9y ago
  I wooed my wife by being able to solve a computer problem as well. Her laptop wouldn't boot, and she had a paper on the hard drive that needed to be submitted that day. "I have just the thing," I said, and I ran home to get my drive-to-USB adapter. Pulled her hard drive, recovered the paper, and printed it from my own laptop. The rest is history.
  • paraknight 9y ago
    This is why I keep a tiny bootable USB (Arch Linux) on me at all times. Future wife, here I come!
    • B4TMAN 9y ago
      What if the hard disk is password protected?
    • tomcam 9y ago
      Solid strategy
• balladeer 9y ago
  Hottest girl in my class had asked for help with how to install a free antivirus on her laptop because the 1 year free-with-laptop McAfee had expired and she was getting dengerously annoying prompts and thought her laptop might be hacked. By the time I was done with "best free antivirus for Windows" someone else in the lab had done it. In my defence I was a linux guy. She married a doctor just after college. So that's there. But I learned my lesson. No more "best of .." unless it's critical or is for vanity.
• rebootthesystem 9y ago
  Most people have no idea why vi made sense way back when (and, in my opinion, does not today). I used VT100 terminals for years on both mainframe and CP/M systems. Keyboards were not very standardized before then, the mouse did not exist and most text editors had to use all sorts of convoluted commands to allow you to do anything. http://www.vintagecomputer.net/digital/VT100/DEC_VT100_SYSBOOT.jpg http://www.vintagecomputer.net/digital/VT100/DEC_VT100_SYSBO... I ran the first version of AutoCAD back then on a CP/M system with 64K of RAM, an S-100 RAMDISK card, an 8087 math co-processor on yet another S-100 card, another card with a graphics co-processor and a 1K x 1K CRT-based analog display. This is the reason AutoCAD has the console. You would type the commands on your VT-100 terminal and the graphics would happen on the stand-alone display. You had to load and unload modules based on what you were doing in order to control memory consumption. AutoLISP, the version of LISP included with AutoCAD, was invaluable. Oh, yeah, 8 inch floppies and no hard drives. Everything worked.
  • linkmotif 9y ago
    Why doesn't it make sense today?
    • rebootthesystem 9y ago
      In all of the discussions on HN about vi/m this is probably the most intelligent question I've received after posting my opinion. I've been coding for 16 hours straight and have at least another four in front of me (have to deliver tomorrow AM) so I don't have a ton of time to answer this. I'll use today as my example of how irrelevant (and counterproductive) vi/m can be. I'm working on a large Django project and cranking out apps like there's no tomorrow. I use PyCharm for this. Here's a case where experts are making it their business to deliver a superior tool that allows me to get my work done. It has myriad tools configured and configurable to help me. I don't have to futz around with weird custom stuff. It is intelligent about Python, Django, JS, jQuery, databases, HTML, packages, Git, Python console, Django console, etc. It can even talk to my servers. PyCharm is, in my opinion, a nearly unmatched productivity tool. I lied. I am working on two large Django projects simultaneously because some of the work for the new project entails porting from an old one. So, two PyCharm windows on two 24 inch monitors and two browser instances side-by-side on the third monitor. Can you setup vim to do some/all of the above. To some extent, yes. I haven't used it at this level in quite some time so I can't answer the question. What's the question? Can you setup vim to match PyCharm feature for feature? I don't think you can, and, if you could, it'd be a nightmare. A lot of the vim "religion" centers around keeping your hands on the keyboard, not using the mouse, carpal tunnel and speed. Keeping your hands on the keyboard is irrelevant unless you are a data entry clerk. If you are a software developer you are far more likely to spend more time doing things other than typing. Designing data structures, diagramming databases, researching approaches to solving a problem. Thinking. The above is also used hand-in-hand with "vim is faster". Yeah, again, if you are a data entry clerk entering tax return records this might have some value. Software development? Nah. The time one could save by only having to move a finger a few centimeters is but a rounding error in the context of any non-trivial software development project. It's silly, really. Take the entirety of a project and multiply typing time by, I don't know, 1.25. It would still be insignificant when compared to the overall project time. Debugging alone takes orders of magnitude more time than anyone could save by typing faster. Not using the mouse. You know, those of us who grew up using, designing, building and programming computers that did not have a mouse were ecstatic when the mouse arrived. It's just plain silly to malign the mouse. I will say that I switched to a thumb operated trackball a long time ago. I don't go looking for a mouse. My trackball is always there, quite literally touching the right edge of the keyboard. And I don't have to move it all over the place to use it. Carpal tunnel. Serious problem. I suffered from this about fifteen years ago. Doing 18 hour days in front of the keyboard was red-hot painful. I tried different ideas. I knew people who had to have surgery on both wrists and were never again the same. I wanted to avoid that scenario. I ultimately did two things: First, I switched to a thumb operated trackball. Mice are not designed right and you have to move all over the place all the time. This is very repetitive and not good. Second, I designed and built my own desk. I welded a steel framework that supported a surface for the monitors at 29 inches off the floor. The framework also had a full length shelf in the front with the surface dropped down about three inches. The front of that shelf had a 2 inch raised lip. So, my forearms rested on this lip and my keyboard and trackball were two inches below that. My hands naturally drooped into that cavity. No more carpal tunnel. Being in front of the computer doing everything from mechanical to electrical to software engineering using various interfaces for 16+ hours is normal for me. I have not had any issues in 15 years or so. None. All of the arguments for vim are simply irrelevant. The only argument I could find for knowing how to use it at a basic to mid level is this: If you find yourself having to access a remote system with a computer that dates back to the stone age you might have no choice but to have to edit files remotely and you know that vim/vi will be on that system. Personally, I have never in over thirty years had that problem. These days I'll use something like CuteFTP if I have to or, as I said above, PyCharm and other IDE's (PHPStorm, etc.) know how to talk to servers and allow remote editing "in comfort". I mean, you can buy a $200 PC laptop with a large 17 inch screen, full keyboard, etc. these days. No more excuses. Bottom line: vi/vim don't make sense because they do not provide any advantages when compared to state of the art IDE's. Wow, I ended up typing more than I wanted to. Oh well.
• megablast 9y ago
  And this does not happen anymore, thanks to google and stackoverflow. No need to ask anyone when you can just google the answer.
  • pawadu 9y ago
    the next generation are doomed to live their lives alone. oh wait, they have tinder