Bryan J Smith wrote:

> And yet, I still run into sysadmins who don't know Vi, and are lost in
> minimal OS modes, let alone emergency ones.  Basically anything where only
> Vi is installed, busybox or similar.

Big deal. 10 minutes with vimtutor should fix that.

> Because people like me get tired of when junior sysadmins crap a system,
> and cannot recover, and call me over and I find out it's because they use
> nano.  It's a pretty bad day when a Sev 1 results, and they cannot edit
> files because they only know nano.

Sorry for sounding like a broken record, but I don't disagree that knowing the 
basics of vi is a good idea. OTOH, wasting two questions on the exam to test 
whether somebody knows the basics of vi is NOT a good idea.

> I'm fine with it being a 'gimme' in points.  That's the point, it should be
> for those who use Vi day in, day out.

People can know the basics of vi even if they use a different editor in their 
day-to-day work. I certainly know enough vi to fix a broken machine but I 
wouldn't touch vi with a very long pole when writing code or documentation 
because frankly it sucks for that. (As I said, people are actually using vim 
today, which can do a lot of useful things that real vi can't, and which is 
apparently almost bearable for such tasks but that is neither here nor there. 
It certainly has no bearing on the “emergency mode” use case since I'm pretty 
sure that Busybox vi is closer to the original vi than it is to vim.)

We should certainly not suggest to candidates that in 2019, vi is an editor 
that is recommended to use day in, day out, especially for editing non-
configuration files in non-emergencies. (Vim might be.) There are much more 
convenient, intuitive, and/or powerful editors available today, even as part 
of the default installations of popular Linux distributions, and people should 
be allowed to form their own opinions. If they decide for themselves that vi 
is what they want, that's fine, but we should avoid giving the impression that 
one must use vi exclusively in order to be taken seriously as a system 
administrator – especially in a day and age where futzing around on a bare 
machine is gradually becoming less and less important.

Anselm
-- 
Anselm Lingnau · [email protected] · https://www.tuxcademy.org
Freie Schulungsmaterialien für Linux und Open-Source-Software
Free Training Materials for Linux and Open-Source Software


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