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I'm not sure it's a good idea to try to stuff vim in there. It's hard enough to try to learn unix command line skills, throwing vim in to the mix is just a deto
by exDM69 14y ago
I'm not sure it's a good idea to try to stuff vim in there. It's hard enough to try to learn unix command line skills, throwing vim in to the mix is just a detour. Nano is good enough for tutorial purposes.
And I'm a hard core Vim user. I have no strong opinions for or against specific text editors but any hacker worth their salt should know Vim and/or Emacs to be able to use a powerful text editor when stranded in the console for one reason or another.
But this kind of superficial introduction to Vim is a big disservice. The last thing we need is people who hate Vim because they understand it poorly based on a short tutorial.
- 9k9 14y agoYour probably right but the author has license to do what he likes because he called the tutorial learn linux the HARD way.
- koralatov 14y agoAs an enthusiastic-but-incompetent vim user, I concur. Reading through that laughably brief introduction is going to scare off a lot of people, and makes the whole exercise much harder than it needs to be.
- pfortuny 14y agoYep, I agree: just the feeling of pressing something and nothing happening is too hard for a novice. Thanks for saying this.
- carlisle_ 14y agoI can recall a situation in one of my first experiences with linux where I wound up rebooting a machine because I couldn't figure out how to get out of vim.
- pfortuny 14y agoMy first vi experience was on a Unix terminal in a CS laboratory with a lot of people doing serious work and I just hitting keys to see if ANYTHING could take me away from that and the thing just BEEEPed...
- Draiken 14y agoBut isn't that a good reason to learn the smallest basics of vim? Maybe it's just me, but after I had my first bad experience with vim, I tried learning the basics so that would never happend again. Since this is a guide for linux, this is a natural step in the linux learning :)
- Draiken 14y agoIf you want to learn linux, you will need to learn vim. It's pretty much the only decent editor constant in all linux distos. I think it's better to get it out of the way or the linux user won't be able to edit a file properly.
- clicks 14y agoUhm.. no. I know _way_ too many sysadmins, even distro maintainers, seasoned devops engineers, who have stuck with nano, joe, etc. for years and years and still stick by it. Although I am glad that I learned vim when I was starting out some 6 years ago, I wish I had spent all that time learning Python or Perl well. Too often the importance of vim is over-inflated as a necessary skill -- but it's just one _tool_ (besides emacs) that gets you some efficiency. That is all it is. I would _never_ advise someone starting out with Linux to spend huge amounts of time learning vim/emacs, it's too much of a distraction in the beginning.
- Draiken 14y agoBut I never said you have to spend huge amounts of time learning vim. You just need to learn the basics and it will help you a lot more than not covering it at all.
- jiggy2011 14y agoTrue, but one thing I noticed is that some command line tools like to just throw vi at you unannounced when you do something that required editing. This was one of the most frustrating things when I was learning linux, "I press buttons but nothing happens, how do I get out of here?"
- ay 14y agoEDITOR environment variable usually takes care of that for most of them. An esoteric example from my MacOS X: sh-3.2# EDITOR='cat' vipw | grep root: root::0:0::0:0:System Administrator:/var/root:/bin/sh daemon::1:1::0:0:System Services:/var/root:/usr/bin/false vipw: no changes made vipw: /etc/master.passwd: unchanged _cvmsroot:*:212:212::0:0:CVMS Root:/var/empty:/usr/bin/false sh-3.2# Great excuse to talk about environment variables and changing/examining them...
- mwargh 14y agoI wrote this guide and I'm convinced basic vi usage is essential to learn. I have to encouter a system without vi yet.
- JasonFruit 14y agoI absolutely agree — vi knowledge is essential, and I don't have it yet. Don't capitulate and let others be like me.
- geophile 14y agoThe first time I go to a machine for the first time, and I need an editor, I fire up emacs. If it isn't there, I do [apt-get|yum] install emacs, and then I fire up emacs.
- mwargh_ 14y agoLucky you :) Good luck running emacs on some embedded things.