alt Hacker Newsquitting 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..)
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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 :-)
> 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.
I'm certainly not listening to someone who thinks vi is used by every developer
You probably don't want a CIO who knows vim.
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.