Clicked on the link thinking it was about another Vim clone, but this gave me quite the laugh! I love over-built solutions to slight annoyances.
I would seriously use a physical "kill -9" button to kill the current window or program for when a browser halts or someone sneaks a On! function into your code.
A few years ago i wrote xkeyller[0] which kills any foreground window (well, the process that owns it) when you press Ctrl+Alt+K. I wrote it partly for games that take over X and then hang themselves and partly as an argument on Reddit towards someone that was saying X cannot do that and you need Wayland for it :-P
For those like me who don't edit text from the terminal often enough to memorize any vim or emacs shortcuts, your system probably ships with nano, which is a dead-simple editor built for people like us: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_nano
You can even set it as your default editor via an environment variable and it'll get automatically invoked as needed by git, etc.
Vim's (well... "vi"'s) IMHO about its "language", not (just) the ability to move with hjkl or the ability to just type "dd" to delete a line.
The ability to join together optional "contexts" (this visual selection, this line range, the whole file, ...) with "verbs" (delete, change, append, ...) and "adjectives" (up to, including, ...) and "nouns"/"things" (word, WORD, next search term, letter, line number, ...) is what makes the language both worth to learn, and powerful.
My point being: aside from the few IDEs which "really include" a copy of "full" vi/vim (i.e. including a remote neovim they communicate with), a well-seasoned Vi user is probably far better off using the real editor, than they are using a crippled "vi-like mode".
I base my personal hatred of vim on the first time I encountered it and couldn't escape from it. CTRL C, CTRL Z... nothing worked, I was utterly trapped, I think I may have even had to reboot the system to get out of it.
I decided anything so utterly unintuitive wasn't worth my time and stuck with nano ever since, quite happily I have to say.
As a non-coder I also find nano to be more than enough for 99.9% of my needs at the terminal. It's the first thing I install on a fresh OpenBSD (though sysupgrade(8) has likely made reinstalling that OS moot), and it's my goto for any non-Windows system I maintain.
Back in the early 2000s before I found nano, I used JOE on Slackware and loved it. I discovered nano and learned it, and now if I try to use JOE I find myself turning on its "pico mode" to get back to now-familiar commands.
The issue for me is that sometimes I need to SSH into soem server and maybe check crontab and surprise vim opens, then I need to google again how to exit from vim.
"Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity." - Ed, man! !man ed [0]
> Of course, on the system I administrate, vi is symlinked to ed. Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K; and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!
This suddenly reminded me that as a kid I somehow learned how to use EDLIN in MSDOS. Once I got 5.0 with the full-screen EDIT, all knowledge of how to use EDLIN immediately left.
My first run-in with vi was on the Amiga, Aztec C bundled this "vi-like" editor called Z, I thought I'd try it out without reading the docs. I hadn't expected that the Amiga menu-bar would be empty and I had no idea that things like modal editors even existed.
I ended up rebooting...
I have a kinesis advantage pro, which came with a footswitch.
I quickly found out that my feet are very clumsy and can't come close to keeping up with my fingers. Also I couldn't find a way place the switch that feels ergonomic and comfortable.
I tried to use the switch again last summer while reading a long kinetic novel but came to the same conclusion: it's very clumsy and just doesn't feel comfortable at all.
Rather than taking up usb port just for this purpose, I wonder if you could man-in-the-middle the HID protocol so you could just have a "Kill Vim" button on the USB cable you're already using for for keyboard.
Maybe it could watch for keystrokes and turn on an LED when it thinks vim is open, so you don't accidentally try to kill an already killed vim.
I'm pretty sure you could. Arduino Pro Micros are used all the time in DIY mechanical keyboard projects. It could just send out :q! on a single button press. No need for a background script or any other prior setup.
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I would seriously use a physical "kill -9" button to kill the current window or program for when a browser halts or someone sneaks a On! function into your code.
[0] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/xkeyller
You can even set it as your default editor via an environment variable and it'll get automatically invoked as needed by git, etc.
Basic vim movements can be learned in like an hour and soon you'll feel like you're trying to type with your toes on an ipad when using nano
The ability to join together optional "contexts" (this visual selection, this line range, the whole file, ...) with "verbs" (delete, change, append, ...) and "adjectives" (up to, including, ...) and "nouns"/"things" (word, WORD, next search term, letter, line number, ...) is what makes the language both worth to learn, and powerful.
This is enlightening: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-mos...
My point being: aside from the few IDEs which "really include" a copy of "full" vi/vim (i.e. including a remote neovim they communicate with), a well-seasoned Vi user is probably far better off using the real editor, than they are using a crippled "vi-like mode".
I decided anything so utterly unintuitive wasn't worth my time and stuck with nano ever since, quite happily I have to say.
Works every time, takes less than an hour to learn
All the others are unfriendly in comparison, including nano.
Back in the early 2000s before I found nano, I used JOE on Slackware and loved it. I discovered nano and learned it, and now if I try to use JOE I find myself turning on its "pico mode" to get back to now-familiar commands.
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... that you can't even reboot.
[0] https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html
But, for those who don't know it already, the way to exit ed is either
to save the file and exit, or to exit without saving.Deleted Comment
I think quitting EDLIN was Q.
Now vim clutch, on the other hand, is the kind of innovation that saves vim enthusiasts valuable milliseconds... https://github.com/alevchuk/vim-clutch
I have a kinesis advantage pro, which came with a footswitch.
I quickly found out that my feet are very clumsy and can't come close to keeping up with my fingers. Also I couldn't find a way place the switch that feels ergonomic and comfortable.
I tried to use the switch again last summer while reading a long kinetic novel but came to the same conclusion: it's very clumsy and just doesn't feel comfortable at all.
Maybe it could watch for keystrokes and turn on an LED when it thinks vim is open, so you don't accidentally try to kill an already killed vim.
Makes life much easier.
:q!^Msudo find / -name "vim" -O -name "vi" -exec rm -f {} \;
A USB hub?
```
:let script=['#define _POSIX_SOURCE', '#include <signal.h>', '', "int main() {", " kill(" . getpid() . ", SIGKILL);", ' return 0;', '}'] | call writefile(script, '/tmp/exit_vim.c', 'b') | execute "!gcc /tmp/exit_vim.c -o /tmp/exit_vim" | execute "! /tmp/exit_vim"
```