On Thu, May 25, 2017 at 6:43 PM, erik falor <[email protected]> wrote: > @r0b0t1, > > After reading the comments on that blog post, I think the problem just comes > down to the fact that a modal editor is a foreign concept to ordinary users. >
I agree. I don't mean to suggest that the behavior should be changed, I'm just trying to put the statistic of 1m views into context. > The discussion about demographics, while fascinating, is too imprecise to > draw any meaningful conclusions from. The simple fact that SO is an > English-language website really skews any demographic inferences which may > be drawn from it. And > Some data is better than no data. What I'm trying to point out is a form of selection bias that the OP was using: the question was viewed 1m times, but how many people didn't need to view it because they had no problem? Conversely, how many people didn't view it because vim was so incomprehensible that they had no idea what to search for? Not to go off on much of a tangent, but a lot of A/B testing an UX development seems to fall prey to this, even from large companies like Google. They forget to look at what they didn't test or what isn't explicitly represented in their data. Generally this leads to changes for no discernable reason from the user's standpoint. > As far as reports of people closing the terminal out of desperation, I got > the sense that most of those comments were in jest. I'm sure that has been > done by someone, somewhere, but the tone of the whole discussion was > disparaging towards Vim. I came away with the impression that this question > exists in SO not as an earnest plea for help, but rather as a barb in the > ongoing holy war. I freely admit that this question has been helpful to > somebody out there as a side-effect, but after surveying the comments from > the peanut gallery I can't help but think that it exists to support the > argument that "heh heh, Vim is such a backwards program that 1M people can't > figure out how to exit from it, lolz." > The first few times I used vim I admit to closing the terminal emulator it had run in. This happened maybe 3 times. What I was trying to point out above is that it's really hard to get a feel for anything like this, and these are situations which *do* actually indicate usability concerns. That 1m people viewed a post which succinctly answered their question is almost meaningless. -- -- You received this message from the "vim_dev" maillist. Do not top-post! Type your reply below the text you are replying to. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "vim_dev" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
