BalaBit Blog

No survey has ever been made but it’s safe to assume that the majority of BalaBit’s products is written in vi. There’s some joe and nano usage here&there, there’s Visual Studio for Windows development and Eclipse starts to get more and more space, but still, the rock-hard basis for editing code is vi. One of the big changes during the last year in our XCB group was switching to Eclipse from ad-hoc editors — it wasn’t enforced in any way, it just turned out that PDT got so good that it was worth to play around with it long enough to get it fit in into our development environment. But for lots of tasks, like debugging on a live appliance or during code integration vi is still extensively used.

It was after such a long day spent browsing through code in vi that I accidentally found out about keystroke commands in Google Reader. I know it’s lame, but I never thought it’d have any — I just pressed “j” instead of the down button just like I had done throghout the day, and it worked. I got curious and found out about all the other commands, and my Feed Reading Experience (TM) just got 100% percent better.

Last evening I was browsing through my 2000+ unread items in GR (hey, it was a busy week and I’m interested in lots of stuff), I got interested in comments for a Slashdot story and went on to read them (button “v”, for the record). It was after spending 10 minutes reading the comments when I realized that I’ve been moving around with the “j” and “k” buttons. And “h” and “l” works as well. Vi power, everywhere.

So I’ve spent the sleepy beginning of this day while waiting for my morning coffee to kick in to look around places in SCB and SSB where the standard vi “h-j-k-l” commands could be used — moving around configuration blocks and pages or something like that. Partly as a usability feature, yes. But mainly as a tribute to the best editor out there and as a way to give something to the hardcore nerd users, for whom, like for me, it became a second nature to use the keystrokes of vi everywhere.