The vi religion

Every age has it's tools. Many, many years ago, in 1976 to be exact, squinty-eyed nerds with a social deficiency ruled the computer world. They talked to eachother in a secret code, wore geeky clothes and made sure that everybody thought that computers were magic. To make sure that nobody could ever use a computer to edit a file, they all swore to never ever use another editor than... vi </scary music>.

For good measure, the SONAU (Secret Organization of Nerds Against Usability) even came up with a devious name for the editor. With a reference to the world "visual", nobody was going to believe you were using an editor even if they were looking at your screen full of green text.

Vi even has a"camouflage" mode where it starts up showing a column of "~" characters. Ha! Now the mortal user will be really lost! Nobody will be able to edit a file, ever again! MUHAHAHAHAAAAAA

ok sorry. lost myself a bit there.

While the SONAU people were in charge,they made sure that every computer shipped with vi. No other editors were allowed. A few brave people at the University of Washington secretly wrote a nice editor called pico. They had to come up with a way to get this editor onto many systems without the SONAU people noticing. So they wrapped pico into what probably is the first Trojan Horse on a computer: pine. Cleverly disquised as a hard to use email client, pine was approved by the SONAU High Concil and before anybody realized, pico was on many computers around the world.

With pico, some people where actually able to edit documents and even programs, and the SONAU lost quite a bit of it's powers. Now, after 30+ years, computers are actually usable, and editors are actually "visual". Because SONAU still has an active underground organization, the term "visual" is still being avoided, and the strange term "WYSIWYG" is used. Actually, the term WYSIWYG also applies to vi in combination with a 9-needle dot matrix printer, but nobody dares to say that out loud. You also didn't read this on this blog, capiche?

Many SONAU members became infurtile by the green screen radiation. An even bigger group thought that women were creatures whose only purpose in life is yell (g)EEEK, turn around and run away. Still, some SONAU members managed to avoid getting a Darwin Award and had children. These children were subtelly brainwashed, and are now scattered over the internet, posting messages about how good their life is with vi.

Painfully desoriented and unable to see the big picture, these children would rather count the atoms in the plastic molecules of their red bike helmet than see the big truck that's comming their way.

I had a collegue like this once. At first, he thought I had supernatural powers for being able to refactor multiple files with code within 5 seconds. In weeks of therapeutic talks, healing and training sessions, I finally got him to see that it was Eclipse, not me, who was doing the refactoring he could not get done in vi. Shortly after he realized I was a mere mortal, and not even exceptionally bright, it dawned: All the work he'd done in the past 10 years could have been done in 2 weeks with a better suited tool. He left the company, and nobody saw him since...

Today I found another poor soul. Even while doing a screencast, typing in vi and telling about what he is doing, he can't see that using the letters "h","j","k", and "l" for navigation is very strange while your keyboard has had arrow keys for the past 20 years, and a mouse for the past 15 years or so. The flashing text in the film like "Esc is bad, Ctrl-[ is good" shows how big the psychiatric problems of vi users is. No sane persion today will press a cryptic 2-key combination while being able to use the much more intuitive "Esc" key to escape from a certain mode.

See the screencast and by your reaction, I will tell if you are a SONAU member.

For people without patience, here are a few absolutely hilarious texts in the screencast which will make you wonder why people are still using vi:

  * Insert mode: don't use the arrow keys
  * Block cursor is "normal mode", thin cursor is "insert mode"
  * Esc (bad) ^[ (good)
  * Visual mode is like holding "Shift" to select stuff
  * Arrow keys bad!

vi is the editor which in "normal mode" can not edit text, and uses a seperate "append" mode to add text to the end of a line, while using "insert" mode to insert text inside a line. It's users are misguided members of their own sect, firmly helping eachother to keep up vi's name, while ignoring reality and other people's belief or needs.