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Comment by SOLAR_FIELDS | Hacker News Reader

It’s kind of weird to NOT know basic vi/vim if you get to a certain point in your career. If you can’t at least open the software, go into insert mode, and save/quit, have you ever had to ssh into a remote server and edit a config file before? Only excuse I could think of is if you literally did everything in windows for your entire career.

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Yeap. Even the hard-core Emacs fanboys at my work know a few basic vi/vim commands. I mean, you're almost certainly going to use it at some point in your career, might as well learn "i -> type something -> :wq" at the very least.

Don’t forget the <ESC> or ^] to get back into normal mode.

I have mastered, in addition to the above, the skill of "dd" to delete an entire line and "q!" if you want to abandon any changes and quit.

Is it? There's plenty of amazing engineers and systems architects who develop (gasp!) on Windows and don't even use command line. And many many of those have designed highly reliable systems driving your basic infrastructure, power plants, industrial systems and myriad of other systems. Why on earth is knowing an old editor connected to anything useful you need from a person in a job?

Honestly I don't know a single good Windows guy that don't even use command line, there are basic things like ping, tracert, curl and openssl that you run in a command prompt. This is assuming you can get around using powershell.

Ping and tracert sure. But curl? I’ll use Postman for quick sanity checking and I’ve never had a reason to use OpenSSL

What's wrong with using nano for that?

> It's everywhere.

It almost litterally is. Even busybox contains a vi clone. While I have encountered more systems without nano nor Emacs than I can remember. Plus, there is no excuse for learning the basic set of commands: i,ESC,x,u, and maybe navigating with the letters (which I'm not proficient at).

I only have to edit a file on Linux once every couple of months of so - I tired of forgetting how to exit vi (or enter/exit edit mode, save the file... just about anything really), so started installing nano as the first thing I do on any system. Nano is so much more obvious than vi.

Also, there's a reason why there are so many "can't quit vi" memes.

Reading the comments about vi... Am I the only one that knows/uses ZZ to save and quit?

As I tend not quit vi that often compared to the time I spend inside, I prefer to use the more explicit version. I have made some mistakes in the past typing `^X-O` in nano instead of `^X-N` because of muscle memory, thereby overwriting a file I didn't want, and I am afraid of repeating this if `ZZ` became part of my muscle memory.

Most people can't install arbitrary software on every system they access.

This exactly. I am pretty sure that if you gain [adb] shell access inside of an android recovery partition (as a random example), you have read-only access to the system, with only busybox at your disposal. Thus vi, but no nano.

vi is enshrined in POSIX; nano isn't.

Been using Linux since the 90's and opening, editing and saving is exactly what I know in vi.

All that does is remind me that I haven't set nano as the default editor on that box and then I move on.

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