News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim. Parent comment

Re:Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim by YeGoblynQueenne on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @03:19PM (#14404304)
Weelll. The problem is that the "quit" command has an insert mode key in it. So it's quite possible to get stuck like a poster above says- enter macro recording, then insert mode, then write the letter "t".

On the other hand that only happens if you type "quit" without the colon and the message makes it very clear that the colon is part of the text you must enter:

  Type  :quit<Enter>  to exit Vim
See all that whitespace? It's very hard to think the colon goes to the "Type" bit.

So you can get stuck in a dubm situation but it's not terribly easy.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim by binarycrusader on Wednesday May 24, 2017 @02:09PM (#14412133)
See all that whitespace? It's very hard to think the colon goes to the "Type" bit.

Except, logically, why would they bother to specially call out <Enter>, a whitespace character, but not the spaces as well if they intended the user to type them?

I can't think of any obvious, safe way to display text that a user should type that isn't subject to possible misinterpretation in the single line of output available.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim by YeGoblynQueenne on Thursday May 25, 2017 @10:45AM (#14417614)
Alright, but if we're being so scholastic it should be said that you can misinterpret any set of instructions and in this case, squinting at the command line a couple of times to make sure you got the command right is all it should take you to get it right.
[ Parent | on HN ]