Announcement : http://vim.begin-site.org/ - The Vim Beginners' Site

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi Nadav,

On Thu, 27 Dec 2012 11:25:10 +0200
Nadav Har'El <nyh at math.technion.ac.il> wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 27, 2012, Shlomi Fish wrote about "Fw: Announcement :
> http://vim.begin-site.org/ - The Vim Beginners' Site":
> > I would like to announce that today I started working on
> > http://vim.begin-site.org/ - the Vim Beginners??? Site, which is a static
> > site
> 
> I love vi - I've been using it for more than a quarter of a century,
> and can probably edit with it in my sleep ;-) But I have to ask a
> sacrilegious question: Is it a good idea to teach vi to beginners?
> 

I tend to agree that it may not be a good idea. My Vim Beginners’s Site is
intended for *beginners to Vim*, not for beginners to text editing in general.
This may be as opposed to http://perl-begin.org/ which also has some focus on
Perl as a completely introductory language (whether or not it is very
suitable for it is a different question, and much of a lot of debate, but
some people needed to learn it without any real programming experience, and
some may still do). 

Anyway, by all means if you can start with an editor such as KDE's Kate,
GNOME/Gtk+'s gedit, Notepad++ for Windows, and other editors like that
(or almost anything except MS Notepad and pico), then all the power to you. You
can learn Vim (or Emacs) later on, when and if you want to.

> Specifically, when I want to teach my 6 year old daughter an editor
> (not a word processor - she already plays with OpenOffice on her Linux
> computer), will it make any sense to for me to teach her vi?
> 
> When I learned "vi", its modal interface (separate insert and command
> modes) and curses-based display were so much better than its predecessor
> "ed", that I couldn't not love it. But today, beginners would find it
> more intuitive to use editors which emphasise mouse gestures and menus,
> and in rare occasion, control sequences.
> 
> Don't get me wrong - vi (and specifically, vim) is still my favorite
> editor. I just wonder how I can justify passing on my love for vim to
> the next generation of beginners.

I've met many young users of UNIX-like OSes on IRC and elsewhere who swear
by Vim. Not sure it was the first editor they used on Linux/etc. but they use
it now and love it. But in this day and age it may require some maturity. 

That put aside, I don't think Emacs is a good introductory editor either, even
though it is also a very good editor (though one I could never get used to).

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish (who remembered that he needs to put up a page with
screenshots on the site. Thanks!)

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
Free (Creative Commons) Music Downloads, Reviews and more - http://jamendo.com/

But if you're writing [open source software] for the world, you have to listen
to your customers — this doesn't change just because they're not paying you in
money.
    — Eric S. Raymond in The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .