I Will Prove vim is Easy
It’s literally three commands:
i
to insert text- Escape to not insert text
ZZ
to save and exit
An old girlfriend once asked me if she could write a website. This came out of the blue - she had no experience with computers beyond installing Sims.
“Is it easy?”, she asked.
I said “yes”, then showed her:
<BODY>
<H1> My Title </H1>
<p> First line. </p>
</BODY>
That was it for a while. When she asked how to do colours, I showed her how to “mix paints” (e.g. ‘#aa9900’) for red and green, and for everything else I just said ‘google it’. 30 minutes later, she’d made a basic site, with a pink background, detailing her favourite computer games.
I showed her ’this text tool which makes things easier’: vim. It highlighted things to help with mistakes, and it just took 3 commands.
30 more minutes and she’d added images to the site, and a big, pink background. I showed her the ‘hjkl’ keys to move around vim more easily, and 30 minutes later, ‘cw’.
Where programmers fear vim, someone with no background wandered in fearlessly because nobody ever told her it was difficult.
A couple of hours in, my website was taken down because she’d illegally linked to some image elsewhere on the web, so that she wouldn’t have to ask me how to transfer images to the server again. Of course, I told her she should feel proud - it takes a lot of work before you can accidentally do something illegal.