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> That's great for veterans, but actively hostile to newbies. I would have to respectfully disagree. With the copious amounts of man-pages, the availability of

> That's great for veterans, but actively hostile to newbies. I would have to respectfully disagree. With the copious amounts of man-pages, the availability of vim-tutor (for this particular case), and all other avenues of help available within most Unix tools, I cannot agree with the notion that software (vim, in particular) is actively hostile. Compared to the copious amounts of software that is far less documented, and far less robust than the standard Unix set of tools, I think calling the command line hostile is at best downright laziness. Please don't call something hostile if you've barely given it a chance. Not every tool needs to be wrapped in a fully animated tutorial with buttons everywhere. In fact, the more elegant tools often don't have these things and do their best to stay out of your way. Which leads to the next part of your comment: > You'd think there could be some sort of middle ground. Why would there be? Any middle ground would risk upsetting two groups: the power users that want the tool to stay out of the way and do what it's meant to do, and the group of newbies (or regular users) that can't figure out what the tool was designed for or the best way to use it. The regular users wouldn't be satisfied with the help available for any middle-ground tool, and power users would just find that the half-baked tutorials, help system, or user support just got in the way. This would cause a rift in the community, which would force some users to search for a replacement that gives better help, while the power users would drift to a similar tool with the cruft and bell and whistles removed. If you're just a regular user, and you end up using a tool like Notepad++ or Nano or some other editor instead of Vim or Emacs, and you can't for the life of you figure out vim or emacs, that is completely fine. Continue using the tool you are capable of wielding. However, that's not to say that vim or emacs don't have their own documentation and help systems, it's just that they're not served to the user in the same way. It may not be directly obvious when switching between systems (example: standard help documentation in Windows is nothing like using man or info pages), but I would reckon that it is only immediately non-obvious because you're already used to another way of searching for help. So please stop calling software hostile, and give it a chance. Truly hostile software exists, but I can guarantee you that basic command line utilities are not it.

Spearchucker 12y ago
Whether you call it hostile or unintuitive, or something else, it's a fact. Unless you're in the field you want to fire up an app, do what the title/description has set in terms of expectation and, if you're the kind that needs it, slowly begin to discover and learn the advanced features. Starting an app and needing to spend half an hour in documentation is not how to sell it. No matter how good the documentation is. Someone else made the same tool that's a lot easier to use, and that's what the users migrate to.
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  There are Linux tools which are optimized toward easy use. If it's editing you want, there are are equivalents of Windows Notepad AND HAVE BEEN FROM VERY EARLY ON. xedit, nedit, kedit, gedit, and more, are all basic GUI text editors. nano (and pico) are very basic console editors aimed at basic users. The point about vim and emacs is that they're not fundamental editors (though learning the basics is quick), they're very powerful performance tools. The problem with tools that don't offer advanced features is that you bang into their limitations very, very quickly. They lack automation, they lack the ability to perform large tasks quickly. And the problem with proprietary tools is that they are limited in availability: they're online-only, or limited to a specific OS, or, worst of all: they company folds and the tools become unsupported and/or unavailable.

Spearchucker 12y ago

Whether you call it hostile or unintuitive, or something else, it's a fact. Unless you're in the field you want to fire up an app, do what the title/description has set in terms of expectation and, if you're the kind that needs it, slowly begin to discover and learn the advanced features. Starting an app and needing to spend half an hour in documentation is not how to sell it. No matter how good the documentation is. Someone else made the same tool that's a lot easier to use, and that's what the users migrate to.

dredmorbius 12y ago
There are Linux tools which are optimized toward easy use. If it's editing you want, there are are equivalents of Windows Notepad AND HAVE BEEN FROM VERY EARLY ON. xedit, nedit, kedit, gedit, and more, are all basic GUI text editors. nano (and pico) are very basic console editors aimed at basic users. The point about vim and emacs is that they're not fundamental editors (though learning the basics is quick), they're very powerful performance tools. The problem with tools that don't offer advanced features is that you bang into their limitations very, very quickly. They lack automation, they lack the ability to perform large tasks quickly. And the problem with proprietary tools is that they are limited in availability: they're online-only, or limited to a specific OS, or, worst of all: they company folds and the tools become unsupported and/or unavailable.