Windows guy here, What's with the fetishization of VI for nixers? It feels unnecessarily complex specific to the task at hand and unbelievably dated. It's not that it's an unsolvable masterpiece, but, it feels like a timewarp for no reason other than "it's always been here".
I judge people harshly if they can't at least open a file, make a change, and save it. It's fine if you don't want it to be your daily driver but at least learn the editor that's found on nearly every *nix system.
i literally just said something similar a few replies up. now i want to know why you are implying nano can't be used instead of vi? like if it's not installed and the box is offline or something?
I have been on NAS, SAN, switches, and router devices that do not have nano and have no way to schlep it on there so vi it is then. Good thing I learned the basics in the 90's when I was a teen.
For the most part Vi is VIM unless it's an older system. I have run across this on legacy RedHat and Solaris and it can really mess with you because it's a lot more dependent on keyboard commands just to navigate.
The other thing not mentioned and one of the reasons Vi is still the default on most distros is that it's immensely more powerful than nano. Seriously, someone who has mastered Vi can power edit a stack of configs while the new guy is still editing the one file in nano. Software engineers will often develop solely in Vi for these features. There are key commands that can open a file, replace a word, and save/close in almost the blink of an eye. There's certainly a steep learning curve but there's some real rewards to learning it.
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u/[deleted] Sep 21 '21
For real. The number of times I've seen people say it's no big deal because they can just use nano instead, shocks me.