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Re:Neovim by PhasmaFelis on Friday February 21, 2014 @08:41PM (#7280621)
For one example, just off the top of my head, most any remotely technically-inclined young person in 2014 knows that you use Ctrl-Z/X/C/V/A to undo, cut, copy, paste, and select all. (Or substitute Command if you're on a Mac--same basic idea.) They've got that down cold, along with a host of other ubiquitous editing conventions--Ctrl-Left/Right to jump words, Shift-arrowkeys to highlight, Home/End to jump to the beginning/end of the screen line, etc etc etc. Basic text navigation and editing is a breeze, straight from muscle memory.

Then you try command-line Unix for the first time and nothing works anymore. You have to unlearn the habits of a lifetime before you can do something as simple as edit text. You can't even remap them effectively, because most of them do something else in vim or bash that you'd have to move elsewhere.

This is one of those problems that is just completely invisible to old Unix hands. It took me years to stop writing code in Notepad, because using vim felt like trying to drive a car with the gas and brake reversed, and someone punching me in the face every time I reach for the turn signal.

I'm not saying Unix conventions are objectively worse than Mac/Windows ones. Once you've got them trained into muscle memory, they're just as effective as anything else. But that need to retrain is a pointless roadblock in the path of every would-be hacker.

Re:Neovim by glesica on Friday February 21, 2014 @10:16PM (#7280856)
Unix was here before all those conventions you listed. So go back in time and tell Windows and Mac software vendors to stop making everyone change their muscle memory in order to use some new software...

But seriously, this is a complaint I hear from undergrads in CS all the time. My answer is the same every single time: stop whining and get over it. You're a professional now, you use professional tools and sometimes they work differently, that's just the price of admission. Nobody whines that driving an 18-wheeler is different from driving a compact car, they just suck it up and train for a CDL.

Re:Neovim by PhasmaFelis on Saturday February 22, 2014 @03:39PM (#7283496)
See, this is exactly the sort of thinking that got this thread started. Yes, obviously Ctrl-C meant Break before it meant Copy. I cut my teeth on a Commodore 64, but you don't hear me saying that Shift-Run/Stop is a superior way to end programs. Older does not mean better. Technology flows like quicksilver; no one says "you're a professional now, so learn COBOL 60 and quit whining." Professionals favor efficiency. Clinging to tradition regardless of drawbacks is not professionalism.

To play devil's advocate to myself, yes, obviously just switching everything over to GUI standards overnight would cause all sorts of problems. Tradition is not inherently valuable, but standardization is. But for fuck's sake have some basic human empathy. In the context of an individual career, having to unlearn and relearn how to edit text is a pointless speedbump that gets in the way of learning actual skills. Teach students what they need to learn to survive in the world, but recognize that their complaints are valid.

Re:Neovim by noir_lord on Saturday February 22, 2014 @04:45AM (#7281582)
They might "whine" if you used the steering wheel on the 18 wheeler to control acceleration and the left and right pedals to steer though...
Re:Neovim by glesica on Saturday February 22, 2014 @11:37AM (#7282563)
That's true, but I contend that the differences between Unix and Windows tools (because that's really what we're talking about here) just isn't that large. For instance, in most terminals you can paste into Vim with Ctrl-Shift-v provided you are in insert mode (although you may end up with weird indentation and such). You can copy with Ctrl-Shift-c. You can use the arrow keys to move around if you really want to do so.

So yes, there are differences, but the nix people have gone to great lengths to bridge the gap, to the point that I have zero sympathy for people who can't make the switch (note that I'm not saying everyone needs to use nix, that's a totally different debate, just that anyone who wants to should be able to).

Re:Neovim by lepht on Saturday February 22, 2014 @12:05AM (#7281047)
That seems like a bit of a straw man: the official OS X native version of vim, MacVim has literally all of those key map pings by default – cmd+c to copy, cmd+a to select all, etc.
Re:Neovim by PhasmaFelis on Saturday February 22, 2014 @03:46PM (#7283522)
MacVim is not official and it doesn't ship with any version of OS X. It's nice that third parties have developed tools to try and bridge the gap, but it doesn't really address my original concern.

Now, the OS X Terminal (and programs run through it, including vim) does support Cmd-C (after highlighting with the mouse), Cmd-V, and Cmd-A, because the OS can treat them as raw text without the terminal knowing anything about them. It doesn't support Cmd-X, Cmd-Z, or even basic navigation keys like Home and End.

Re:Neovim by PhasmaFelis on Sunday February 23, 2014 @04:36AM (#7285401)
I really don't understand why neutral statements of fact get voted down. Is somebody way too emotionally invested in the discussion? Somebody reflexively downvotes anyone who makes them examine their assumptions? That dude I told off last week stalking me? Misclick? It's just weird.
Re:Neovim by ciupicri on Friday February 21, 2014 @11:54PM (#7281023)
Add this to ~/.vimrc

    " Make it behave more like a (Windows) GUI editor
    source $VIMRUNTIME/mswin.vim
    behave mswin
and use gvim - the GUI counterpart.