On Wed, 2022-07-20 at 09:57 -0600, Joe Zeff wrote: > I draw that conclusion from reading many posts here and elsewhere > from Linux newbies using vi because (and possibly only because) > whatever walkthroughs they're trying to follow specify vi, instead of > just a text editor. There you're into the territory of a tutorial trying to provide one set of instructions for an editor that is on virtually every Linux system, and that those who know how to provide those instructions will probably use the thing they use all the time. I have seen website instructions that used other editors. I've also seen instructions that have repeated how to do the same thing using several different editors. For an author that would be quite annoying. Most of the time I use gvim. I got used to it, it's customised, the coloured context highlighting is very useful for looking for typing errors by eye. Other editors are actually too simple for most of what I do. But even for the very simple plain text editing tasks I do less often I'll still use gvim or vim, it makes little sense to use one editor for this, another for that. But, in general, I tend to agree. I'd rather provide instructions that say edit the /etc/hosts file and put your hostname on a line with your IP address, instead of explicitly listing all the hotkeys to do so. I also prefer instructions that explain the task you're trying to do, not just list the steps involved. Being told do this, do that, without any reasoning behind it makes it harder to tailor something to your own needs. Unfortunately, I find I can't even give people instructions to open the Firefox preferences and change the something-or-other setting from this to that. They don't have the nous to look through the menus inside Firefox and find "preferences" or "settings" or "config" by themselves. I have to tell them the third menu across, the exact name of the settings option on their distro, the exact name of the setting to adjust in their distro. This is where the mindset of Gnome design gets in; make everything work one way and take away anything that can customise it differently, it's easier to learn and explain when there's less to explain. Some computer nerds spend more time customising their desktop than actually doing work on their computer. But the average user that I've come across don't do any customisations, some are afraid to in case they break something, they just fumble through using what they can see on screen by default. They often seem quite surprised how I can fix something, but it's not arcane knowledge. I merely look through the menus, see what options I have available to me, what they say about themselves, test some of the likely ones out. I don't randomly pick things to see if they might help. After decades of doing this I find I'm surprised to find just how many people don't seem to be able to read and comprehend beyond a grade three level. Now it's a welcome surprise to find someone who doesn't need step by step guiding through an entire process. There are people who've used computers for 20 years and still are unaware of copy and paste, and drag & drop. I had one Mac user complain they didn't use Windows when I suggested the dragon-drop (pun intended) method to easily do what they were doing, unaware that Mac championed that method right from the start. When I started out using personal computers, it was done by people who had an interest in it. We wrote programs, we didn't buy them. The computer came with virtually nothing. I'm baffled by people toying with computers who have zero interest in computing, or don't actually like them. And I have contempt for government services that try to push everyone onto doing things on-line. -- uname -rsvp Linux 3.10.0-1160.71.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Jun 28 15:37:28 UTC 2022 x86_64 Boilerplate: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the mailing list. _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam on the list, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure
