Nerdy post

[omarius]

Lord help me, I'm finally learning vi. I find myself trying to do :wq to close a Web browser and odd things like that. It's seriously doing bad things to my brain

Comments

[omarius]

I am used to 0 being False, but the convention for Unix seems to be, "if you get any exit status at all, something is borked." So, it seems nothing is true. Unix: score one for moral relativism. No, wait... ;)

[ilanarama]

Aha, maybe this explaines why this script I have been using has flags to set 0 for true and 1 for false, which drives me bonkers.

[editgrrl]

I was going to ask for a geek to English translation, but after I read it a second time I sort of understood it. Either that's scary for me or you're a good teacher. *g*

p.s. The only code I know is html-based, although I can understand and modify pre-written javascript.. so there is some basis for my confusion and shock at semi-comprehension. :)

[omarius]

I used to teach Unix in Hawthorne's undergrad and graduate Electronic Publishing classes that he did for the English department. That was fun, and good practice for explaining by analogy. ;)

I keep telling my class that so much stuff is based on Unix that once they learn enough they'll start recognizing odd things in unexpected places in the IT world.

HTML is "markup," not "code." *smacks your geeky hand*

[editgrrl]

I didn't say I was a very good geek. :)

[omarius]

...she said to the guy who's been administering Unix systems and using PICO for a text editor for ten years...;)

[omarius]

I'm already doing it in Pine a LOT.

[yong_mi]

I kept hitting 'd' in the editing window of IDLE (Python development environment) and then would be puzzled why I kept getting error messages, before realizing that hitting 'd' didn't delete characters. D'oh.

[ilanarama]

I do this ALL THE TIME.

I have known vi for way way long, so long that when I got another job after 3 and a half years not doing any Unix stuff at all, my brain had forgotten vi commands, but my fingers knew them instinctively. Very weird.

[cdk]

I really dislike :wq. :w, then :q. Then again, I :q! a lot, since I often use vi instead of less.

My version of Pine exits if I type :wq or :q on a menu screen. I have it set to use vi as an alternate editor, so I never try to leave PICO with :wq, because I'm never in PICO.

[cdk]

(It's totally accidental that it exits on :wq or :q, of course - : and w aren't recognized as commands, q is quit, and enter confirms.)

[cdk]

It bugs me because getting in the habit of always using :wq when I'm done with vi discourages me from (1) saving without exiting and (2) exiting without saving, both of which are often sane things to do. It slows me down to think about "am I ready to save and exit?" When it's time to save, I type :w. When it's time to exit, I type :q. Sometimes nothing happens in between those two, but it still keeps me thinking more about what I'm actually doing than "I'm not looking at this document anymore, time to :wq" without thinking "did I make changes that need saved?"