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budman1 | on: Bored of eating your own dogfood? Try smelling your own farts
quitting vi is a basic competency test.

would you listen to a doctor that could not suture a cut? how about a mechanic that could not remove a socket from a ratchet?

simple file editing. vi has been around for every. if you haven't seen it, and needed it at least once, what have you been doing?

(personal anecdote: once had an engineering VP bring up that a stray ":wq" in a document was a sign of a real engineer...working outside of where he should be..)

vovavili | parent | next
It's more of a cheap gotcha than a valid test. If we take somebody like me, I learned to code in IDEA/PyCharm, these days mostly code with either Zed or OpenCode, and occasionally drop into nano and Positron. I wouldn't be able to do anything in Neovim without looking it up simply because I had no reason to learn it. A doctor who learned practices appropriate in the 20th century might now necessarily be hired for knowledge of these practices today.
ericd | parent | next
I’d been developing with emacs for years before I learned how to quit vi. Just means he’s never had to change the config on a remote server with a barebones setup :-)
Quarrelsome | parent | next
> quitting vi is a basic competency test.

no, its pop quiz bullshit. Oh you know about ":wq"? Well done! But if you don't know, you do it a few times and now you know. It does nothing, outside of teaching you a bit about poor UX.

> if you haven't seen it, and needed it at least once, what have you been doing?

using one of the other available ides?

> once had an engineering VP bring up that a stray ":wq" in a document was a sign of a real engineer...working outside of where he should be..

That's not a sign of good judgement, that's a sign of being technically fashionable. It's hipster shit, akin to rejecting a candidate because they're a fan of Taylor Swift and don't know who the band Tool are.

johnisgood | root | parent
What distinguishes knowing about vim from knowing about virtually anything else? If you apply to a job in tech, you should know that by long-pressing the power button, your PC turns off. Is this pop quiz shit, too? The bar is ridiculously low these days, apparently.
Quarrelsome | root | parent
are you being sarcastic? Its nothing like the power button. Everyone has to press the power button but not everyone has to use Vi.

:wq is one of the most insane key combinations to quit an app and this is just hipster shit where people who use vim think they're the only "real engineers". It's just a disgusting level of arrogance and masturbation. The code is what matters, not the IDE. To focus on it as a sign of technical excellence makes a mockery of what engineers are supposed to care about (comp sci things) and replaces them with all the elegance of a high school bully belittling some other kid for not wearing Nikes.

pavlus | root | parent
It's not about using vim, it's about when you had to sudoedit a config on a server you visited the first time, and it had vim as default EDITOR, so you have to know how to exit it and open nano, or whatever you use. It's about exposure, exposure to many small things is a sign of experience, it is experience, to be precise. If they don't know small basic things, it's a sign, they don't have relevant experience. Can also check, if they have empty lines at the end of their files, know how to remove docker images from their machine, or get a TCP/UDP joke.
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hnthrow0287345 | parent | next
I'm certainly not listening to someone who thinks vi is used by every developer
budman1 | root | parent
used. maybe not. but cognizant of it. sure. and having used it once or twice.

come on! you are a software expert and you never had to edit a file on a machine where claude was not available?

thunderfork | root | parent | next
aside from gedit and geany and nano and emacs and notepad and vsc and notepad++ and sublime text and...
budman1 | root | parent | next
what would you say about a EE that could not use a scope?
Quarrelsome | root | parent | next
i would say that analogy was made by someone who seems to labour under the misunderstanding that you can only write code from within vi.
pavlus | root | parent
I'd say, their degree is BS. You can't finish Uni as a EE, without using a scope a few times.
Quarrelsome | root | parent
what if I told you some people weren't baptised into the unix ecosystem. Wild, I know.
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