[lucideer]

> Strongly disagree with that one. A UI that lets you work in the most efficient way (e.g. vi) can also be well designed, even if it's incredibly difficult to learn.

See, I don't think you do disagree. I said a UI should be learnable while being used - vi is. I said nothing about it that learning needing to happen quickly.

I use vim every day; it's not my primary editor, but I'm incredibly comfortable with it, which I wasn't for years after I started using it. But during those years of learning, I never got stuck with an unusable dev environment, I never lost data, I never had to Google how to proceed in order to get my work done. If I ran into a problem, I had the option of opening an alternative editor and continuing with my nice non-corrupted dev env, or I could choose to spend some time figuring out the vim way (and learn something).

vi/vim have no foot guns.

Perhaps this comparison is slightly unfair to git - vi is much simpler insofar as a modal interface is a simpler concept to grok than directed acyclic graphs. So they're not directly comparable, since vi's main barrier to learning is memorising commands and git's is conceptual. However - as has been mentioned elsehwere - hg makes a fine candidate in that regard.