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by ByteJockey 1480 days ago
> "Vi" is not "just naming the editor what it is", it's a relatively distinct short name that doesn't actually mean anything unless you know the reason for the name (which I did not for years after being introduced to it).

But "visual" is was vi is. That's its grand innovation. It took a lot of it's (non-motion) commands straight from ed, but let you see the entire page of text as you changed it. ed didn't do this because it needed to be conscious of teletype machines.

It's a direct abbreviation of ex's "visual" command (and used to just launch you into ex in visual mode), and everyone using it at the time would have known what it meant.

> If you don't know the relationship between the GUI name alias, and the literal process name, how are you supposed to figure it out?

Oh boy. If you do not appreciate doing deep lore spelunking to understand things, the unix/linux ecosystems are going to be frustrating for you. Half of our stuff still pretends it's operating on those old character based teletype machines I mentioned earlier.

> How are you supposed to search for info or help about "files"?

Do you have the same problem with the "fork" call?
1 comments
alanbernstein 1480 days ago
Good job missing the point completely. None of these things are problems for me, now, a computer professional who spends my entire day in a POSIX terminal. What about the people who don't have that advantage?
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ByteJockey 1480 days ago
> What about the people who don't have that advantage?

For the text editor? For general help, they will probably google "gnome text editor help" or "gnome text editor docs" like I just did, which returns >80% results for the new application despite it not existing for very long.

I also tested this in a private window in case google is tailoring this to my, generally more tech heavy than normal, history. It immediately came up with this general rundown/intro to the editor: https://itsfoss.com/gnome-text-editor/ which covers installation and even how to view the list of keybindings.

For more specific features, they'd probably google something like "gnome text editor $FEATURE".

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