# motd:  If you accidentally end up inside vi



## johnblue (Aug 19, 2016)

This was the motd when I logged in:



> If you accidentally end up inside vi, you can quit it by pressing Escape, colon ( : ), q (q), bang (!) and pressing return.



I had to lol because of the word "accidentally".



The flip side is that when I watch someone that is really good at vi I am always wishing that I would spend the time to get good at it too.

*sigh*


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## SirDice (Aug 19, 2016)

First time I used vi(1) I had to reboot the machine, I just couldn't figure out how to get out of it


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## Nat_RH (Aug 22, 2016)

vi is so powerful.  I have to keep a cheatsheet for those commands not frequently used.


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## tingo (Aug 22, 2016)

I learned to use vi, because back then, it was the only editor you could count on being installed on the various systems I worked with.


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## _martin (Aug 31, 2016)

johnblue said:


> I had to lol because of the word "accidentally".


Actually, I can understand that. If you have shell in vi mode (set -o vi) there's this feature, neat or annoying depending how you like it to invoke the EDITOR for a command.

It executes the command you have there. It happens to me from time to time that I accidentally press ^v (or esc v) and end up there. Similar to the fc builtin of bash/csh.  As ^v is very common for paste (e.g. iTerm2 on OSX allows to paste to terminal with it too) it's not that hard to end up in vi.

I started as a joe user . First vi encounter is always .. well, first time. Now I can't imagine myself using different editor.


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## sizigee (Aug 31, 2016)

SirDice said:


> First time I used vi(1) I had to reboot the machine, I just couldn't figure out how to get out of it


Me too... the fun times


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