[ale] [EXTERNAL] Time for this Grey Beard to stir up some stuff

[Byron Jeff]

The short answer is yes, it's hard.

Line editing has a completely different mindset than typical visual
editors. It actually takes training to understand that keystrokes are
commands and not content. There is a point where one needs to ask is it
more important to understand the process of using vi/vim, or is it really
more important to get the configuration done and to keep it moving.

Like you, I wouldn't use anything else. I'm typing this E-mail in vim. But
for me with nearly 40 years of usage, it's second nature.

I teach my students nano. It cuts 3 weeks of intro to vim out of my course.
nano works the way they expect an editor to operate and the commands are
listed on the bottom of the screen. I know it's like riding a trike. But
when it's more important to get somewhere than to learn to ride the hog,
nano serves this purpose just fine.

BAJ

On Wed, May 26, 2021 at 04:56:31PM -0400, Chuck Payne via Ale wrote:
>    Good Afternoon my fellow Grey Beards,
>    So I have noticed that more and more post teaching people to do stuff
>    with config or anything on the CLI, are using nano.
>    Why in Gods name would you teach them that. Is VI or VIM so hard. I
>    gave up on Emacs ( My first editor by the way ) years ago, but if you
>    worked on FreeBSD, you had vi. If you worked on Solaris, you had vi.
>    Linux has vi.
>    I have come to love VIM, I do most of my edits in vim. I enjoy color
>    syntax in vim.
>    I get the joke that exit is hard if you don't know how to do :q! or
>    :wq, but Emacs was so much harder with crtl-x something, something.
>    Anyway, every time I see nano, I want to scream, "You kids don't know
>    anything. Get a real editor."
>    People who don't know the magic of doing things like %norm $T.D, to
>    delete everything after the period. Or the beauty of using sed to find
>    and replace. Truly are missing out.
>    --
>    Terror PUP a.k.a
>    Chuck "PUP" Payne
>    -----------------------------------------
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-- 
Byron A. Jeff
Associate Professor: Department of Computer Science and Information Technology
College of Information and Mathematical Sciences
Clayton State University
http://faculty.clayton.edu/bjeff