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> If it's a change worth making, you shouldn't have to communicate it. > > Your users shouldn't say, how does this work? They should say, this is how it should have worked all along.

I think that this is extremely limiting. I am a moderately skilled vim user, just 'power'ful enough that I have a range of vim-specific tricks up my sleeve, and am frustrated when other editors (seem to) make the same tricks difficult to achieve. However, no one will accuse vim's feature set of being easily discoverable.

By your criterion, it seems that this sort of behaviour, which is hard to learn but powerful once learnt, can be ruled out; and this seems to confine us to a sort of playground where we can perform certain tasks very, very naturally, but are then confined once we need more.

In short, I would change your slogan (which I think is very catchy!) to the less euphonious "Your users should eventually say, 'this is how it should have worked all along'."



Within the context of the discussion, vi is horrible.

What benefit does vi provide for a user that will only ever use it once? Why should he bother learning it if he's not going to use it but one time?

However, vi is good when you plan to use it often. The skills learned will benefit you years to come. It's worth a learning curve.

Both these ideas were noted in the article, and from my take, expanded upon by the above commenters.




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