[seszett]

Not "q", but "Q".

Actually, when entering Ex mode you get a little helpful message that says Type "visual" to go to Normal mode.

If you do press "q" though, you're in macro mode, and you don't get any helpful message that tells you that you have to press "q" another time to exit it.

[dllthomas]

To be clear, it's q at the : prompt to quit vim, whether in visual mode or ex mode. It's Q in normal mode to enter ex mode (or you can start that way with -E).

[k__]

I see, thanks for the clarification :)

Vim always seems like magic to me. I always use nano/pico when I need to edit something in the command line.

[drostie]

I'll tell you the dinky stupid reason why I started using vim over nano:

I like my shells to have white backgrounds. I don't know why, but it's just restful to my eyes. Nano's default syntax highlighting on bash scripts is to highlight strings in bright yellow, which on a black backdrop makes sense, but on white is impossible to read.

It took years of working with shell scripts, and a familiar litany of "I'll just look up how to change this... [one hour later] I have no idea, let's just change my Konsole background to black for a little while..." before one day I was like, "Dammit, I just need to change this one little thing over here" and typed vi instead, thinking that it was so simple that surely it'd have no highlighting.

But it did have highlighting, and it was highlighting which wasn't bonkers like nano's was.

I had struggled with vi a lot before. I did not like it. Still don't. The thing is, they could probably have won me over a million years earlier by starting me off at insert mode on the first line! It is modal, and I don't even like the modality of my cruise control system on my car, let alone the modal nature of vi -- but at least a text editor should dump a beginner in the mode which, y'know, edits text. I'm only just getting used to hjkl keys, and only then because of nethack. I don't know enough to make super expert use of vim.

But, all that aside, it won because it didn't force me to squint at yellow-on-white text every time I was SSH'ed into a system which needed me to edit string-laden syntax-highlighted files.

[dllthomas]

"The thing is, they could probably have won me over a million years earlier by starting me off at insert mode on the first line!"

I wouldn't like "open in insert mode" at all - if I'm opening an existing file, I probably want to edit it, not just add text (especially not at the beginning) - which means the first thing I'm probably wanting to do is navigate, which is much easier done in command mode.

When opening a new file, there's a better argument for starting in insert mode, but even then I'm likely to want to populate the buffer with the output of some command.

Of course, hitting escape first isn't disastrous - but neither is hitting i before you type.

All of that said, my defaults don't need to be your defaults! Add startinsert to your vimrc to get the behavior you want:

    echo startinsert >>~/.vimrc

[drostie]

Very interesting! I'm more interested in it as an attraction to new users; I agree that "morally" it should probably start in command mode since it should be designed for its most common use cases first.

I'm just observing that I would have understood it much more rapidly if I'd started in insert mode my first few times, because then the expressive command mode enabled by the Esc key seems "layered onto" the basic insert-mode editing that a new user expects to be the main purpose of a text editor. From insert mode, you can page down and delete and insert pretty straightforwardly; and you get gently introduced to command-mode when you say "hey, how do I save this document now?". So pedagogically it would have really helped.

[dllthomas]

I have mixed feelings on the pedagogy. On the one hand, it would have eliminated some frustration, which would have presumably been helpful. On the other, driving home that "normal mode is normal" serves a pedagogical purpose as well. The power of vim really starts to emerge when you internalize that inserting text is just another action.

[umanwizard]

"evim" (easy Vim) is normally installed wherever vim is, and opens in insert mode by default.

[k__]

I always used IDEs when I wanted highlighting.

Used nano just for some small changes when using SSH.

[sejje]

Vim is a programmer's dream.

If my only use were editing files in CLI, though, I'd have always used nano and not learned vim, as well.

[chongli]

vi is a sysadmin's dream. I use it for editing any and all files on myriad remote machines. I especially love the ! command which lets me pipe parts of a buffer through shell commands such as column.

[dllthomas]

It seems like "perform a bunch of pretty similar changes across most lines of a file with a couple hundred lines" is the kind of thing that shows up far more regularly for sysadmins than for programmers, and it's something where vim shines. The last time I worked somewhere with someone in an explicit "sysadmin" role, they were regularly bugging me for vim tips (not that I minded).

[k__]

I thought IDEs were a programmer's dream :D

[rspeer]

IDEs are a programmer's depressing reality.

[cwyers]

Yeah, I remember when I was first learning Linux, I was pretty much thrown into the deep end with nobody to help me much. I got into vim to edit a text file, and was... completely lost at sea. I figured out how to install nano and have never touched another Linux text editor since.