2y ago

Very clever...

I'm trying out Obsidian for taking notes, and this made me laugh.

292 comments

Funny, but unironically a pretty good idea.
- One of my first computer jobs was working in a student computer lab at my undergraduate university. This was back in the mid 90s-ish.
  We had three types of computers - windows machines running 3.1 or whatever was current then, Macs who would all do a Wild Eep together when they rebooted en masse, and Sun X Windows dumb terminals that were basically just (obviously) unix machines for all intents and purposes. This was back when there were basically like 5 websites total, and people still hadn’t heard of Mosaic.
  So everyone wanted the windows and Mac boxes, and only took the xterms when there was nothing else open. I was the primary support person for them since none of the other people wanted to learn Unix and I was the only CS major.
  The X boxes suffered from two main learning hurdles. One was that backspaces were incorrectly mapped into some escape key sequence, and the other is that it would drop you from (I think) pine into emacs as a mail editor as soon as you hit it. 90% of my time was telling people how to exit emacs. It was that, putting more paper into the printers, and teaching myself more programming than I was learning in classes.
  
  My god that brought back memories. The first commands when sitting at a new terminal was always, always:
  stty sane
  stty erase '^H'
  It was well into the 2000s before Unix had useable defaults.
  
  God, I remember the backspace thing. I hope whoever allowed a computer to be shipped in that condition got fired.

nano crew where you at
- It's hard to hate nano, but IMHO there also isn't anything to like in particular either. It's basically a TUI notepad. It's there, it lets people edit files... and that's pretty much all there is to it.
  
  You can use nano without having to read anything about nano. That might be the only thing that is better about it than vim, but it's a damn important thing.
  
  it's basically a TUI notepad. It's there, it does one job and that's all there is to it
  That's what the people who like it like about it.
  
  That’s it’s job
  What else is there for it to do?
  
  nano is just... There when you need a text editor for something. Simple and purposeful
  
  It has syntax highlighting and mouse support.
- I like nano because it has worked any time I needed it. I don't dislike nano because I'm not good enough at Linux to have ever run into its limitations
- nano gang checking in.
  However, I’ve been forced over time to remember “:wq” to get unstuck should vim randomly appear.
  
  Alternatively, you can save a key and use :x (And :q! to quit without saving)
  Yeah, that’s such a Vim user thing to say :P
  
  :up|cq to save a write cycle and signal an error to whatever opened Vim.
- I personally like nano but it's what I used first. So I learned the commands. Vim I still forget Everytime.
- Pico gang reporting in.
- % of the time I'm using nano to edit something in the terminal, and it's usually something really minor. I'm using GUIs for the majority of my computing anyway, so if I need some robust text editing, I've got a bunch of easier-to-learn, easier-to-use options available, and that's totally ignoring things like awk, grep, sed, etc.
  
  My god, what is this 100 image...
- i’ve only ever used nano in the early stages of a gentoo install, when it’s too early to install vim and import my dot files 😈
- Here!
  I hate terminal-based text editors
  Nano seems quite user/idiot friendly
- hopefully switching to micro
  
  I made that switch a few months ago just so I could cut, copy and paste without having to lookup how to do it. it's been great.
- Proudly, first thing I install on Termux.

when you click enable vim it should just start nano
- I hate when I use visudo and it opens in nano and I try to use vi controls
  
  jjjjjjjjj
  
  Gotta set your sudo editor environment variable

Why would I want to exit vim?
- I tmux my vim session so I never have to exit it, I just end the session and NOTHING OF NOTE HAPPENS
  
  Just all those left over swap files I forget about because they are in every one of my dot ignore files.
  
  killall vim
- It is much easier not to

It's very easy to terminate vim. I just use the power button.
- Uh... so u guys don't change the PC each time that's cool I would definitely try that ...
  
  Tried it's a scam , doesn't work
  
  If I could afford to change PC - I could afford real IDE

If anyone needs the command: :q!
If you want the computer to ask if you're sure: :q
If you want to save: :wq
- You’re nullifying that safety measure by doing this you know
  
  Some people just want to see the world burning
  
  Nah, the safety measure is designed to make sure they can quit vim. Now they can quit vim.
  
  It's the opposite of nerd sniping.
- If you want to save: :wq
  Or :x
- :wq will write even if you didn't change anything; :x won't. (similar to :w vs :up)
- ZQ
  
  and ZZ for save & quit
  
  :cq because why not :)
- I prefer ZZ if I want to quit and save

I don't mean to be all "BuT iT's cLOseD SoURce" but you should give Logseq or Zettlr a try. They're similar WYSIWYG markdown editors, but also FOSS. Zettlr also has vim keys.
Plus Obsidian is horrible at editing tables.
- Also not a fan about the closed source thing, but I like about Obsidian that it's all just markdown. If I ever need to ditch it, I can keep and use my existing files as they are.
  Would this also be possible with Zettlr or Logseq?
  
  Exactly, that and the mobile app. Having simple markdown files and ability to sync them with Syncthing are just too good.
  
  I don’t know about Zettlr, but last I looked at Logseq it worked off markdown files similar to Obsidian.
  That said, I felt Logseq wasn’t quite ready for prime time when I was doing my research a year or so ago. So I went with Obsidian and have been very happy with it.
  
  Been using Logseq for six months, and yes. It’s all just .md and media files referenced by relative links.
  This was an important factor the choice to use it. Having used several note taking applications / systems, getting your data ‘out’ in a painless fashion is the #1 concern.
- Thanks for the suggestions, I'm actually checking a couple new editors out as i'm looking for an alternative to OneNote. Just started messing with this one, but i'm not sure if i'll settle for it yet.
  
  I’ve heard good things about anytype.io, but I havent had the chance to use it personally.
- I just commented this elsewhere, but I personally feel that their reasons for being closed source are worse than actually just being closed source.
  https://obsidian.rocks/why-isnt-obsidian-open-source/
  
  There's nothing there that really strikes me as disingenuous or bad. If they wanna be closed source, they can be, for whatever reason(s) they want. Does it mean a number of people (me included) are less likely to use it? Yes. But outside of our bubble here, most people don't care about open vs closed source software.
  
  I was about to comment that their website also claims "legitimate interest" to create a personalised ad profile on me, before I realised that that is not the official Obsidian website. But yeah, the stated reasons are dumb.
  
  It's extra work they don't totally see the value in and they want to be able to sell their product? Those seem like pretty normal reasons not to maintain an open source project.
  
  They also want to be able to support their families by making money through the Obsidian application, which could be more difficult in an open source environment.
  This is the only one that seems really legit to me. That and the other commenter that said open source is more work, which is probably true, and if you're not getting benefit it could be a net loss.
- Coming here to recommend Joplin, been using it for years and it's a great note app, markdown + external editing supported, open source, CLI & GUI clients, encrypted... Does everything right!
  
  Firstly Joplin is great note taking app and if that is all you want you really should go for it. I used it for years and was really happy.
  But Obsidian is far more than just a note app. It like a Wikipedia page, you can add links within the text of your notes to another note. But they are also bi-directional, meaning you can see the incoming and outgoing links.
  Making easy to use the related notes instead of just link to it. Sometimes you did not even think this note could use that note information and it shows you can connect them.
  Not only that Dataview lets you live index and query your data. Letting me build a template and query that data dynamics.
- Logseq has an Android app. Zettlr doesn't.
  Edit: I tested Logseq. It has the basic functionality down, so for many it might be great. For me, though, it doesn't come close to what is possible with the plugins of Obsidian. So for now I'll stick with Obsidian.
  
  The Android app is horrible btw. If I had to guess it's just a desktop web page scaled down and packaged in an app.
- I tumbled across Zettlr when I was looking at maybe replacing Zim for my homebrew TTRPG games at the table. I use DokuWiki online. I ran my Star Wars game through it. Pretty impressive.
- Zettlr is a great program, but to recommend it while bashing Obsidians table editing seems interesting. I've never used Obsidian so I can't say how good their implementation is, but I know I've struggled alot with the Zettlr tables...
- There's a table edit plug in that makes it easy. The gripe I have with it is not being able to right-justify numbers (or maybe I haven't looked close enough)
- Would love to but I’m not going to pay a subscription for sync (one time would be ok), or have my data on a random aws instance. And last time I checked there is no plugin for your own self defined sync storage like Nextcloud. Once there is, I’m having a go.
  
  It's just markdown. You should know how to use git, use it.
  
  there's a git plugin which can sync with any git server
  
  You can use FolderSync to sync your .md dir to nextcloud. It suited me well because I use foldersync for other purposes, too
- I would in theory prefer FOSS. But what is the situation with plugins and themes? Can I use obsidian plugins with any of those? If not, I'm probably not gonna switch.

I mean, it's true.
I've been using linux pretty exclusively at home for almost 25 years now. Program. Script. Work in the shell a lot, and the other day I had to use vim and it took me a while to remember the basic commands. I'm a nano guy :\
- Honestly, if you work in a shell a lot, learning vim is a great investment. You're gonna fly through files editing them faster than with any IDE.
- I also started off using nano. Have you tried Micro? It's like nano on steroids and with good keybindings
  
  Nano, Pico and Micro? is this editor trying to !compensate for something?
  
  At some point Nano added Ctrl+S for save. That's all I needed. Its syntax highlighting is decent too.
  
  +1 for micro. I install it on every server I administer, and alias it to nano. If you're a nano user and haven't tried micro, I highly recommend it. It's like nano, but built this century, it feels fast and modern.
- I'm with you on that. VIM is a good example of a tool that the deepness of the tool makes it aggravating to use for the 90% of simple use cases.
  Unless you use VIM enough for the shortcuts to be second nature it is faster to install Nano, make the changes, and remove Nano than it is to use VIM.
- If you feel like it definitely give it another go. Vim (or neovim) is just insanely good once you've developed the muscle memory for the keybinds.
  It takes a bit of time and practice but it's actually fairly user friendly once you understand how it works. (c for change, y for yank, p for paste, e for end, b for beginning etc.)
  
  I was a nano person for the longest time, was planning to try out vim but never did, until i saw a coworker using it and he explained a little about the vim "language" actually worked and how much you could do with it
  With some encouragement from him and a week or two of reduced productivity i was able to do everything just as fast in vim as in nano, and it only got better from there, now i find any other editor slow and tiresome in comparison
  
  If you want something that is quite a nice editor too but doesn't require hundreds of lines of configuration, try helix. It also has nice help menus so it's fast to learn. I've used vim since the 90's and Emacs for many years, but nowadays I kinda just like hx how it just works with zero configuration for any programming language I need to work with.

Big brain time, pkill vim
Vim: Caught deadly signal TERM
Vim: Finished.
Terminated
- So from within vim :!pkill vim?
  
  Or ctrl-b " pkill vim for my tmux enjoyers
  
  :!kill -9 -1
- You need pkill -9 vim to really make sure it's dead.

A lot of my personal dislike for VIM would be done away with if it just had a helpful common keys cheat sheet (basic cursor navigation, edit mode, exit with and without saving, etc) at the bottom of the editor window like Nano does.
- I understand where you're coming from, but as a frequent user of vim I'd much rather have the additional line of text.
  
  That makes sense, I mean your monitor can only fit like six lines of text.
  
  It should be default on, with a setting to turn it off for power users
- Having the commands listed at the bottom by default is one thing i personally dislike about nano, because they take up space while being useless to someone knowing the commands (or at least knowing how to open the help in, which is what you can do in vim to achieve the cheat sheet). The alternative that vim uses, is to show the commands when starting the editor without opening a file.
  
  is there not an option to turn them off??
- one of my favorite things about helix is how easily you can check the keybinds for certain actions - just space-? and then you can see a list of every command available (by description) and their keybinds, if they have one
  
  Not to forget the buit in popup showing the shortcuts, similar to which-key, but built in
- This is the only reason I have any idea how to navigate nano.
- Try nvim
- Really, I'd just recommend using nano then. It's installed basically anywhere you can find vim and works perfectly fine as a text editor! To use vim effectively it has a learning curve no matter what, so it's not necessarily meant for everyone.

You don't change Vim, Vim changes you. https://youtu.be/9n1dtmzqnCU
*edit: shortened and thanks! Did not know and gross..
- Good human?
  But seriously that's helpful info.
  
  I noticed this, and was wondering what the hell was going on.

There's a few different ways to write that command in vim, does it accept all of them?
- I'm honestly not super familiar with vim. I tried :q! and it accepted it, what are some other ways?
  
  :q :3
  
  :quit!, :qa!, ZQ
  
  :!killall vim
  
  :wq will save and then exit, while :x will save only if the file has been modified and then exit, and then there's ZZ that does the same as :x, plus there are probably others:-)
- No, I tried ZQ the other day, does not work
  
  my disappointment is immesurable and my day is ruined.

If you want to learn vim, try the command vimtutor in a terminal

Alt-F4
- if your desktop environment uses alt+f4 to quit 💀
  
  If yours doesn't use it, you know what it uses instead
- Take my fucking upvote and leave

I just can't quit you, vim!
- You can't just quit it. Vim is one hell of a drug.

Tricky question, but I think I have a solution:
:!readlink /proc/$PPID/fd/* | grep "$(dirname %)/.$(basename %).sw" | xargs -I{} rm "{}" ; kill -9 $PPID
- Technically correct

That is just hilarious but also...
I just remembered that Bram Moolenaar, the author of vim has recently died...
He was a real good person. Back when he released his first vim for Amiga Computers I exchanged some emails with him and he handled even my less smart suggestions very professional.
I just take the chance to remind everyone to spend some money for his Uganda Charity.

That is a hilarious, yet useful test.

I think this is the most upvotes I’ve seen on a Lemmy post….
- Lemmy seems to be the old nerdy internet of the 90s, prior to the enshittification
  
  That's why I like it. No BS, no ads, no commercials, no show-offs, etc. Just some people with a bit of free time share their knowledge and stories.
  I do wish we have more vibrant non-tech communities, though.

You guys can exit vim? 😁
- A1: Sure, but why would we want to?
  A2: Yes, it's :q![Enter]emacs[Enter]
  
  New problem. I am now stuck in emacs.
- nah, i just start a new terminal with :terminal and then start new vims inside that...

Huh. Which one of them?

Oh man, that's awesome. Aren't there a couple ways to do that though?
- they accept :q! but I haven't checked anything else yet
  
  According to Stack Overflow, there is also:
  :cq (quit without writing and return non-zero exit code)
  ZQ (quit without writing from normal mode)

I just noticed someone should try xkill if they get the chance. If that doesn't work they should rephrase the question. That is all. This will be my last grand contribution for today. Have a nice Wednesday everyone :3
- This is usually how I end up exiting vim without saving, at least if I’m honest about it.
  Maybe one day I’ll get better at it. Nano has been plenty for me.

Oh wow, that's an easy way to not implement a feature ;)

Easy ESC ESC ESC ESC ESC ESC ESC ESC ESC :q! Or alternatively ESC :q!

I love obsidian, you'll love it
- I switched recently from Trillium.
  After installing two dozens plugins, it may just replace my KB site, note apps, task manager and PRM all at once.

https://github.com/hakluke/how-to-exit-vim

Easy, just turn off computer.

That’s pretty wizard!

Vim is the program that can beep and ruin files.

Great idea for when you start in IT! Always had trouble first year in my apprenticeship when i had accidentally opened vim. Ask for first time and after 2 months not used.
Did someone already open a pull request?

How do people not know how to quit vim in 2023???
- This you? ;) meant lighthearted
  
  Hahaha yessss 😊

292 comments