Look, honestly, to me at least, this horse has been dead for a 1000 years and we’ve been beating it since then. Initially I was as well, “haha funny, what is vim, so hard” and then I happened to interact with it for the first time, did a web search and all the amusement died. If it’s like this we should make fun of Ctrl+C as well because “Omg, so hard to terminate a terminal program, there is no X to click on” just because this is non standard for a user that is familiar with only the GUI. We could abstract and transform this meme 1000 times because there will always be somebody who knows how to do something and then there is something else that doesn’t work the way he/she/they/etc. are used to and searching for an answer is too hard.
Or am I just dumb, ranting about something that doesn’t even matter because in the end there will always be new people, for which vim is new and hard and vim maybe is the most popular thing most of the new users on here have a hard time understanding. Will this meme ever evolve into something else at one point? Was there a precursor to this meme before vim or vi existed? What are other similar memes that I reacted to the same way because I find myself in a similar spot as most people find themselves with vim and I am just a hypocrite?
TL;DR: Just disregard my useless comment, enjoy the things you want to enjoy, and be happy, you only get one life, don’t waste it getting mad at useless shit.
I think it’s just a memorable shared experience that a big portion of Linux users had at one point. That kind of thing is prime meme fuel. And sure, there is always a fresh supply of people who ran into it recently.
For me, I’ve been familiar with *nix for decades, but I’ve only been a daily Linux user for about a year. I remember using emacs back in my Unix days, so the sudden unexpected learning curve of vim commands is fairly recent to me. I’ve already seen like 50 variations of this meme since joining the “lol exiting vim” club, but they still amuse me.
Now if we’re talking about vi, that’s a whole other thing. First time on a system and the git editor was set to vi, and I was like oh I know exactly how to get out of this because I know vim a bit, turns out I was wrong. It did legitimately throw me for a loop haha
Hey, I read man pages all that time, Vi/Vim are just unreasonably complicated. Sure, those commands had sense when there were no key modifiers available on keyboards, but in this day and age, to not at least add some shortcuts to be part of the program by default… thanks, but if I have to read a man page to exit a terminal text editor, that’s just not really my cup of tea.
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