This is how we trap it. This is how we win.
This is how we vim😏
Are you sure? It looks like this is going “Hey, I can’t get the front door open to the house, so I called the cops and told them I was being held hostage so they would break down the door with a battering ram.”
How long is it before CoPilot can’t exit vim and just deletes vim as the solution?
I hope it does delete vim with itself inside it. Yesplease.
I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t exit vim.
No one can exit vim. It’s simply not possible.
There are even legends that the devil himself was onced tricked into opening vim and is stuck there since.
That explains the many vim enthusiasts that don’t want any other editor. They simply can’t exit the vim instance they once accidentally opened…
The Eagles called it Hotel California.
“We are all just prisoners here of our own device”
So true, so true.
Stockholm Editor
Vimmer here, this one’s right: I’ve been stuck since 2003.
You just reboot. Right?
“… and that’s why I need you to take the power plant offline.”
“… and that’s why I need you to take the power plants offline.”
For those who don’t live in the US and have an electical grid with more than one power plant.
:!sudo reboot
Every computer has a built-in “exit vim” button, conveniently located on the chassis, usually next to the power cord. Flick it to 0, then back to 1, and you’ll find vim has been successfully exited. :)
What if my PC boots straight into Vim? It’s not like I need anything else, can do everything in Vim
Jokes aside, vim as PID 1 is just a bad idea.
Emacs on the other hand: https://github.com/emacs-os/el-init
That’s a great idea from GitHub user el-sloppo and Claude.
To be fair, I’ve seen this done a long time before LLM slopped everything, but I think they ran emacs as PID2 in that variation.
Anyway, good luck doing it in vimscript.
Did you read the retrospective.md
AI;DR
Then you obviously didn’t read it.
Yes. That’s literally what I said.
That settles it. Emacs is better than Vim
I bet this comment actually pissed off some people. Lol
Oh it’s like Zombo?
As discovered by plyth, you can’t do anything anymore. There are limits
Seeing you reply made me click the link, where is my beloved! At least the new owners want to keep it Zombo.
Not anymore.
crap
Can vim be pid-1? No? emacs can B)
mmmkay.
You simply need to set up a MCP server which controls the smart plug and give the AI access to it.
I don’t even know what a MCP server is and I feel like I’ve somewhat dodged a bullet there. Ignorance is bliss. :)
Ok this proves that AI has reaches human level intelligence.
so human of it!
Isn’t it? I can’t decide whether I believe this is an easter egg
If it was trained properly on Internet data it would just respond with “you can’t”
If you need to exit vim, just open a new terminal and reboot the machine.
I don’t often see folks with such well earned nicks. Usually for dinner not to be, but that’s rather why I’m here.
Well, it has to earn its stripes just like the rest of us in IT! No shortcuts, even for an LLM. :D
When I first got into BSD (way before Linux) I found man pages useful… but no way to leave them. Not even
man manwon’t tell you how to exit a man page!So I world tinker, eventually needing a man page, reading what I needed – and then hard power cycle the machine. -_-
I was pretty good with computers, but that was a humbling experience. You just don’t know what you don’t know, and if you can’t ask… sometimes you just get stuck. Just like in KQ, LSL, SQ, … The Internet is (was) a blessing.
Instructions: “Next, open the .config file in vim…”
Me:
What a weird way to spell
nanoNano is the proper tool for this job.
neovim
but
use whatever you like
I prefer micro, but I never use it because my brain just autotypes nano and then it’s too late I’m already in
You could alias nano to micro
Move over, my friends are here.
*Vim
It has achieved the same level of awareness as the average emacs user.
I often see Copilot get stuck in a nonresponsive shell after it used
cat > file. It’s hilarious to watch the first time, but I’m a bit tired of it by now. Why doesn’t it just edit files like it normally does?Why doesn’t it just edit files like it normally does?
Haha. Yes.
But it does everything the most probable way, according to all the stack overflow it has swallowed.
Sometimes that way makes sense. Sometimes not.
Because efficiency is never the point. All gimmicks of “artificial intelligence” throughout history is how automatons do things the way humans do it, with human interface. The mechanical turk, the robot maids of the 70s, etc.
The mechanical turk, the robot maids of the 70s, etc.
Yes.
But I’m a little sad that I still can’t buy a robot maid or butler.
I figured they would exist by now, for about the price of a vacuum.
I’m not demanding that they actually be any good. We could just program them to quote “The Jetsons” and do some simple vacuum pathing, or deliver a tray full of drinks.
Failures are making occasional news, but bots are getting better at walking. Doing useful tasks will be a few more years, but I think it’s coming.
Claus Weill often write a python script to update a file. It’s pretty funny.
Blowing through all those tokens failing to exit a vim
First funny thing ive seen Microslop Copilot do…
Why :wq doesnt work?
If it’s a read only file it won’t work, but it might be in insert mode and can’t escape.
It should have tried :q!
I think it might not be vim.
Why?
It’s started something on a terminal. It is assuming it’s vim, but it’s not operating like vim. I’m questioning it’s assumption. If it had fired up nano, for example, sending vim key sequences isn’t going to work. Seeing as it seems to be doing stuff with git too, it may not have started this editor explicitly. It will be using whatever git is configured to use.
Oh, ok yah. It might not be vim. It could literally be anything. I just thought I’d missed something
Could be in recording mode, which usually needs a couple ESC or a Q then you can :wq
You mean EX mode? IIRC recording mode doesn’t prevent exiting vim
Ah just looked up EX mode. Didn’t know capital Q entered a different mode, I just wrote “Q” to emphasize the key in general not capital Q specifically lol.
Personally I love vim, it’s just powerful enough for me for my bash scripts. Anything more complicated then I’m using a proper IDE or something more simple I’m using Kate or whatever graphical editor for my DE.
Nah, just looked it up. Recording mode is activated by pressing “q” and allows you to record your inputs for a macro. So if you forget to do “:” and just press “q” you’ll enter Recording mode and have to press “q” again to exit Recording and then you can do “:q” or whatever you needed.
But if you don’t know what you pressed and don’t know how to exit Recording mode then you’ll be stuck. I’ve seen coworkers get stuck in this from time to time.
We’re a RHEL shop so our vim version may be different, but Recording mode doesn’t let us exit vim directly, we have to exit Recording mode and then exit vim. Again, might just be our setup.
i cant understand all the vim hyping. its probably very neat and can do whatever, but what good is that if it takes awful amount of bother to learn everything by heart since interface has been designed to be as unfriendly as possible. it doesnt have to be fit for office worker, but at least some ease of use is needed.
The interface is modal editing, which, yes, takes some getting used to. The payoff is that you get a kind of programming language for text editing. Rather than memorizing ctrl+shift+alt-style keybinds, you decompose stuff into chainable actions.
Have you ever played a video game, be it with kbd+mouse or gamepad, and realize you’re doing a bunch of stuff without actually consciously thinking about what buttons you’re pressing? That’s what working in editors like Vim or (my fav) Helix feels like.
Rather than memorizing ctrl+shift+alt-style keybinds, you decompose stuff into chainable actions.
By memorizing something else that’s equally or more obscure.
Just in case you’re not trolling, here’s a simple example:
yi)means yank inside )-parentheses. It copies the contents of round brackets. Core commands like these are relatively easy to rememberWhich is something you have to memorize. Do you honestly think that that is somehow easier to memorize than say “Ctrl-Shift-5”?
Yes. It’s mnemonic and composable whereas your key chord isn’t. It’s fine if you don’t care for it. Each to their own. I’m just explaining the appeal of modal editing
Interesting that you use the word “chord”, because guitarists and piano players have been remembering chords forever based on the position of their hands, not based on some letters and numbers. Your version isn’t more easily memorized, it’s just different.
They’re also fairly versatile.
y-itakes any symbol after. Space, comma, the letter p, you name it. If you can type it, it’ll generally work.Which can be a bit faster than some graphical editors at times, where you might have to find and select the contents by hand. That can be a bother if there’s a lot.
since interface has been designed to be as unfriendly as possible
No, it hasn’t.
It (well, vi, which vim is a clone of) has been designed to be a possible interface on a keyboard that doesn’t have arrow keys or other modifier keys than shift. There aren’t that many ways to program a visual text editor when those are your constraints.
That it’s more productive once you know it is a side-effect.
It (well, vi, which vim is a clone of) has been designed to be a possible interface on a keyboard that doesn’t have arrow keys or other modifier keys than shift.
That sounds great and all, but in the last 40yrs I have not owned (or seen…) A keyboard like that. For whom the heck was this useful? 😁
Not mocking, I do use vim or nano, but also never got why it had to be so incredibly unintuitive.
You don’t have to move your hands while touch typing. This is the single biggest reason why vim is still used today, regardless of whether you have arrow keys or not. In fact vim does support arrow keys and using the mouse as well! It’s just much easier to edit files without needing to move your hands and/or use a touchpad/mouse.
Even then, not having to move your hands means not spending time… Moving your hands.
This is useful for people who want to spend time learning to be enforcement at what they do. In the same way that holding a Nintendo controller “weird” is useful for Tetris speed runners.
If you are as efficient as you need to be using a shower interface, then great. Other people need (or more likely want) to be more efficient than that.
Maybe I’m a luddite, but I still don’t understand why people want to spend their time arguing with Claude code and fixing it’s bugs. Rather than just learning to write productive coffee themselves. But, people do. That’s their choice, and I let them to it.
If prefer to spend my time learning him and code, than Claude and idiosyncrasies, and then whatever to comes next, and next again.
At the time vi was originally developed, such keyboards did exist (on terminals). That’s the reason it works the way it does.
Weird terminals but ok. I actually even like vim
My netbook has a keyboard without Home, End, PgUp, PgDn, Ins and Del keys. Vim and Emacs modes make it significantly more usable while remaining small. Vim is also convenient in Termux, for quick remote fixes from a phone.
I never thought anyone needing an editor would use such devices for it. But OK, that makes total sense for those.
Vim is actually highly ergonomic; you can do everything with a minimum of keystrokes without moving a hand away to a mouse or touchpad or oven the arrow keys. If that’s worth the time investment to learn it, is a highly subjective question. But I’d say it’s a lot easier than many people think.
Though, if you prefer, you can also move your hand to the mouse. With the scroll wheel and good hand-eye coordination, you can get pretty close to the speed of a true vim exper–haha jk, they finished converting the entire source file from python to rust using a specially crafted regex by the time your hand reached the mouse and implemented a matrix view by the time you scrolled to the line you wanted.
And when you say that falling green symbols aren’t that impressive, they look at you in confusion for a moment before realizing what you meant and handing you a VR plug to show you what “matrix view” really means.
It’s a specialist tool. You can say the same thing about any specialist tool. Why should CNC machine tools exist if they’re so hard to use and take a lot of training and are dangerous in the hands of untrained people?
Reject CNC machines, return to rock!
The CNC machine seems to be significantly easier to turn off when you’re done with it, though. Judging from the memes, anyway - I’ve never had to use vim, thankfully.
ESC
then
:wq
Write quit
:q!
Force quit (no save)
I don’t even use vim, other than for commit messages lol
You can also use
:xto write and quit, from memory.
It’s very heavily overstated how difficult it is to exit VI.
No, no it’s not
I want to see copilot directly control a big cnc machine. Might be entertaining.
fluency. languages are hard to learn but when you know them you communicate better. same as touch-typing, or mobas.
Learn Vim motions and use a plugin for another IDE. You are losing so much time and mental energy using a mouse for coding. You can also use something like NVChad with NVim and have a Vim that looks more like modern ides.
maybe it really would be worth the effort to learn 🤔
That’s the really hard part. You will be really slow before you get fast again. I couldn’t practice at work without getting fired for getting nothing done. I had to learn at home doing projects, which also means those project basically made no progress for a while. There are some really cool things that people never talk about. Like NeoVim has this integration with JetBrains rider that acts as a bridge and connects the two. Changes are live on both and you only switch to Rider to debug.
It’s not “designed to be as unfriendly as possible”, it’s designed to be exactly what you configure it to be, that’s why I love it. Every keymap, every screen position, every worflow, the way it searches through lines and files names, everything was configured by me, so whenever I do something in my editor it always make absolute sense for me, because it was literally made for me.
If you get me to someone else’s neovim config I would probably be absolutely lost because it’s a very unique experience for each person, some people like to bloat it out with plugins others like to keep it bare minimum and so on.
One biggest lie abput vim is the productivity, it doesn’t make you that much faster in comparison to any other editor if you take the time to learn the keymaps from them, the real strong point of neovim is having an editor that is absolutely tailor made for you in a way you cannot achieve in OOB editors.
Yeah, but as a 30-year vi/vim user, using it nearly every day - it IS pretty user-unfriendly
The initial learning curve is very rough, since people might be used to commands from a newer editor like Notepad++, which doesn’t work in vim.
nano at least says which button combination you need to exit, for example.
It is easier past the initial hump, though.
yes, i can get behind the configurability, lets you make the program into your own personal tool nicely. my problem is that you have to do it in such difficult and unintuitive way. though it has been very long time since i last took a look at vim, so maybe things have improved and its easier to configure now, i doubt it though.
So it would be nice if getting into it was easier even if you havent used it as your main editor for last 50 years. not being able to even exit vim without looking up guide for it demonstrates this quite nicely.
Nowadays there many neovim distros that come setup with everything and you can learn as you go, but definitely not user-friendly still and the distros kind kill the point for me personally.
I totally understand prefering users friendly tools, but I think that fornevery software there is always some degree of granularity that makes it user unfriendly.
You asked about what the hype about vim was, I tell you: it’s the granularity of the configuration it’s 100% not it’s user friendliness.
It tells you how to exit if you press ctrl+C, which is many people’s first instinct.
Friendly is useful in an application you use once a week. Anything you want to work with daily, like a text editor, needs to be efficient.
The cult of vim feels very superior for being able to plow through its user-hostility
I learned (neo)vim this last year. It really wasn’t that bad. You need to learn like maybe a dozen hotkeys to get going, but after that you can do
:h <topic>for everything else. And it’s not even like you lose full functionality of your mouse, at least neovim supports a lot of mouse movementsAnd even if you decide to go for modal editors, Helix is a lot better out of the box
My preferred text editors are Neovim and Kate
Kate has some convenient features, mainly the easy GUI. Neovim is the CLI text editor that I find works best for me.
The Vi editing mode in Kate is also good, without a need to install any extensions, just one tick in the settings.
Okay, I’m going to use vim, and you get to use vim’s predecessor, ed. I’m sure you won’t mind, since vim is soooooo user-unfriendly! Right?
Vim doesn’t suck any less because something else is worse
My point is that vim’s design makes sense if you take into account the historical context that it was developed in.
In terms of command line editors,
vimis extremely powerful and relatively easy to get started with, once you know how to get into insert mode and then save/quit.nano/picoare easier to learn but less powerful, andemacsis probably more powerful thanvim, and more daunting to learn. Also,vimis installed on almost all systems, so there’s not really any extra work to get started using it.
