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What do you hate about linux?
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2025
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Linux
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Is this the first time you've had the pleasure of using vi/vim? 😄 visudo is a command that locks the sudo file and just opens vi or vim. It's not a text editor in and of itself.
Vim is the source of the famous "how do you quit vim", meme. (:q , btw) The interface is completely nonintuitive and has modes. In "edit mode", all the buttons do different edits to text or move the cursor. That must have been your experience: trying to type in edit mode and getting garbage. You have to enter "insert mode" to type using the
Ikey. Commands to do things like save and quit are started by typing a colon in edit mode. You navigate in edit mode using HJKL as arrow keys.To avoid it, set your default editor to nano instead. Nano's hotkeys are nonsensical to people coming from Windows, but at least they're displayed on the screen at all times.
$ export EDITOR=nanoVi/vim is honestly a horrendous tool. It's nice if you want to spend a few hours memorizing commands and learning how to use a text editor. Then you can do cool stuff.
But it very much shouldn't be the default tool for anything really.
In any OS published some time within the last two decades you'd expect a decent GUI settings tool to handle all that work for you and if you really need to sudo a text config file it should at least by default launch a GUI text editor for that purpose when running in a graphical shell.
vi/vim/nano/emacs are ok for CLI only setups, but there's no point to have any of that as defaults or even recommendations for graphical sessions.
Oh yes, nano is what I eventually resorted to using despite the menacing warning in red not to stray from the visudo path.
I had actually used vim before when I tried out Linux 25 years ago or so. Didn't leave a favorable impression then, either. And no, it didn't convince me to switch to emacs. 😉Different taste of terrible, IIRC.