Item:
Make sure you know how to exit your Unix text editor.
General Information about Item:
- Oral Folklore: joke or proverb
- English
- USA
Informant Data:
Aaron Svendsen is a CS Major in the Class of 2019 from Hopkinton, New Hampshire.
Contextual Data:
There are a variety of text editors in the Unix operating system and each text editor has a different way to exit. Students who are just starting out with the Unix operating system don’t often know this beforehand. If you can’t exit the text editor, you are stuck within the text editor and there is really nothing that you can do about the situation. You cannot work on something else while you have a file open in the text editor.
Transcript of Associated File:
Informant’s Comments:
One funny joke or situation that goes around whenever new students like myself are using Unix is how to exit text editors. Every text editor has a different way to exit, and it is funny when you can’t figure it out. I first heard this joke during a CS 50 lecture. CS 50 is the introductory course at Dartmouth for the C programming language. Text editors are a crucial part of C programming and unlike regular Microsoft Word or other text editors, there is no immediately apparent way to exit. It is impossible to exit unless you know the keyboard command to do so. A funny situation is created when the students cannot get out of the text editor and back to their other work. Sometimes the student will also press the incorrect command which may cause some other unintended effects.
Collector’s Comments:
This could be classified as a joke, because it is poking fun at students without experience in Unix operating systems and text editors. It could also be considered a proverb because it can easily be reworded to express the fact that you should always know how to exit your text editor to avoid getting stuck.
Collector’s Name: Weiliang (Michael) Li
Tags/Keywords:
- unix, text, editor, students, programmer, novice, cs50