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Google suggest vi for Emacs and Emacs for vi (google.com)
244 points by letientai299 on Dec 10, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 82 comments


I'm fond of "Alex Trebek" including "Did you mean: Who is Alex Trebek." Nice homage.

https://www.google.com/search?q=alex+trebek


I had to add hl=en to the url to get the expected result (forcing the page to english)

https://www.google.com/search?q=emacs&hl=en


I miss the days when Google used to be whimsical and weird.




Doesn’t seem to work on Safari/iPad


It does work on iPad but only in mobile viewv (iPhones default to mobile view so thats why it works "out of the box" there). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fgVHP3Nlww


It works for me on Safari/iPhone perhaps it’s to do with the size of the window


That's hilarious ! Reminds me of the « french military victories » query that suggested « french military defeats » (which, as a Frenchman myself, pissed me off in a funny way :p)


It's also funny how the way you recount the story is the way most people remember it. It is, in fact, not what happened!

What really happened was that someone created a web page that resembled the Google results – and included that suggestion. They managed to get that page to become the number one hit for the search term "french military victories". The idea was then that if someone hit "I'm feeling lucky", it would seem like Google suggested "french military defeats".

The page is still up, although the Google-like appearance is no longer very up to date: https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/text/victories.html


> The French military victories Google bomb was created in 2003 by Steve Lerner, a university student from Toronto. Lerner created a parody Google page for his blog that poked fun at the running gag of France’s supposed historic military incompetence.


Supposed?

The white flag was literally the national standard of France for a while.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flag#Ancien_R%C3%A9gime_...

France's second-greatest or third-greatest national hero literally sacrificed all the women and children to save himself (and failed to save himself, at that):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Alesia#Siege

Not to mention France's betrayal of Poland at the start of WWII (there was a mutual defense pact, which France satisificed trying to not annoy Germany):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II#War_breaks_out_in...

Failing to face Germany together, France then promptly got conquered itself, providing scant resistance even when attacked. It then collaborated with the Nazis.

Then there are the English raiding parties into France. Remember the Black Prince? Heh. France was way bigger, but way cowardlier. The "flower of European chivalry" was killed altogether by a bunch of poor peasants from England because it turned out the French knights had zero discipline.

The only time when France had its military act together was during the time of Napoleon. Otherwise, it had a modest success by bullying technologically-inferior places during the age of colonialism.

After two millennia of this sort of crap...


Lerner? Is his name also a joke?


Lerner is a fairly common German/Jewish last name



Some AI just want to watch the world burn.


This is obviously some plain old I


Only on the Emacs link


Don't they all?


No. A paperclip maximizer wants to make paperclips.


I laughed so hard!

If somebody missed the reference: https://decisionproblem.com/paperclips/


I knew about paperclip maximizers but had never seen this game. I just spent about 3 hours playing it. It was fun.


The Google organization is clearly sensitive to the role of online services play in promoting divisiveness, and doing something about it.


Clearly the issue is it should suggest vi for emacs and vi for vi :)


Absolutely not. Nor should anyone nod towards the bastard child of the two called spacemacs ... Emacs FTW :)


Of course not, because they nod towards SpaceVim


Damn this I’m starting SpaceEd.


*nvim for vi


I'm still using classic vim. Should I move over?


what got me to switch was being able to run terminal commands in a buffer...

https://neovim.io/doc/user/nvim_terminal_emulator.html


I don't use it that often (I just open up another terminal), but you can also use ^Z to put vi in the background. It would be more useful if I didn't always forget and open up a new vi which would refuse to write to the file :)


I honestly do both. When I'm running something I want the output from (some to yank), I'll run in a buffer.

If doing file manipulation, CLI, etc. etc. I'll ctrl-z out.

I do the opposite of you pretty often too, always trying to `fg` a non-existent vim


Hmmm. I hadn't thought about being able to yank output from a command... That's a really good point. (Honestly I would probably use 'xsel -bi' and ':r !xsel -bo', but that's pretty ugly.)


Serious question: why not just open another terminal?


The integration is nice, it behaves as a normal buffer. So you can use all the standard modes and motions, splits, copy output to another buffer easier etc.


But modern terminals can do all that, with an editing mode that is tailored to terminal use rather than editing text.

Sorry I just don't understand why I'd want to use a text editor as my command line.


They can't though, a modern terminal cannot behave as a vim buffer. You can't have 25% of your terminal as a shell and the other 75% vim, they can't split like that. I'm not aware of any terminal that allows integration with vim registers or use vim motions.


You can use it as a normal buffer. Run command, switch to visual, go copy and paste. Way nicer than `:r !command`.


You can use :terminal in vim.


it's optional for the build: https://vimhelp.org/terminal.txt.html


Only if you want very specific plugins.


Not really. vi doesn’t have some very basic motions that are supported by (n)vim out of the box.


I liked how if you go to vi the page has the following:

Did you mean emacs

A top ad placement for VI(trademarked) Vodafone and Idea which are now trademarked together! So exciting.

A top stories link - Vi (Vodafone) launches Rs 948 family postpaid plan with unlimited benefits: Check details The Indian Express·14 hours ago View all

Which is really great that I can keep up on all the news about Vodafone.

questions people ask about Vi, half of which are about editor and other half not.

at 100% zoom on my mac air I get half of the questions interestingly enough before I have to scroll down.

Wikipedia page about the editor

So I have to scroll down to see the first relevant hit, now of course it makes total sense that vi has other hits, also because in Danish it means we, but the dumb joke on the top makes it sort of silly, especially if I just followed from emacs to vi, because in that case I would think - huh, a vote for ranking results for text editor +10.

Maybe I'm just easily irritated right now.


> Wikipedia page about the editor

> So I have to scroll down to see the first relevant hit

FWIW this is the top result on DuckDuckGo and Searx, and on the latter most of the first screenful of results are about the editor (all if you count https://vi-editor.com/). Interestingly the first screenful of searx results all come from DDG (the next has many from reddit), but the pages are definitely different.

Edit: and on Startpage! So apparently your results may just be the result of Google trying to create a personalized filter bubble for you.


This definitely has something to do with your (or my!) search bubble because the top link for `vi` for me is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi, followed by "Basic vi Commands - Colorado State University" and "How to Use the vi Editor - University of Washington" (vim.org is the 4th link)


Probably because I'm in Denmark, maybe Vodafone has taken an ad in the European or Scandinavian or Danish market.


In US, behind a pi-hole, all results on the first page except one are directly vi-related. Not sure if this might have something to do with the fact that I've been searching spacemacs keybindings nonstop in the past 2 weeks.


I don't normally use Google.

I search for 'vi' and all of my links are about the editor.

You experience is clearly customized for you.

This is why I don't normally use Google.


why is it whenever google customizes something for me they do such a bad job at it! what's wrong with me! /teary teen voice


"Did you mean: vi"

That sounds like a "passive aggressive" post from /g/ haha!

There's also this https://twitter.com/xkcd/status/1333622758052388864/photo/1

Someone from google said search is just a kind of AI. I think some other people like to say AI is just a random number generator that's good at convincing people there's some intelligence.


There's something AI-like going on, it just happens to be significantly dumber than the old thing:

My "favorite" type of search problem is when I as a developer search for Angular mat-table and it shows me tables with mattresses on: Clearly something is going on in there but it is dumber than most dogs and to make matters worse - less obedient too (For 10 years Google couldn't get itself to accept when I asked for verbatim results, they just had to insert some absolutely irrelevant pages into the the top 10 results every time to waste my time. Now I have changed my defaults, DDG fails just as badly on this, but trying in Google is faster from DDG than the other way around and also it feels good.)


Also `recursion` is interesting.


And askew


I guess this is manually set by some employee, but I wonder if such links might have been also created automatically for some topics.


Cheeky, google. What's next, type Windows and you suggest Linux?


Search: install windows 10

Did you mean: install gentoo


No, it's obviously Arch.

Gentoo users are busy doing other things and don't have time to push it into everybody.


By other things, you mean compiling? :-)


I didn't want to put it that explicitly...


Also "erlich blachman" and "erlich bachman"


Search for "Star Trek"

Google: Did you mean "Star Wars"?


In the same vein, Wikipedia will disambiguate "The one with the whales" to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.


When I type "string", it returns commercials for g-string models. I love it because it makes me realize I'm living in in a small bubble.


ha; this says more about your search history than you think :-)

I get results for Java, Molecular Biology, String Instrument repair shops & a video by Shawn Mendes - Strings.


I get balls of literal string. I must not live a very exciting life :(


Emperor's Stringettes?


Busted!


Try working with a library that prefixes all of its class definitions with T and defines its own string class. That was the day that I learned on a work computer that a TString may refer to a type of underwear and not just a library class.


A friend was seeking information about StripX, a product for stripping insulation from wires. I heard him say, "Note to self - do not type 'strip x' into Google in a family environment."


If you think that's something try googling c-strings (not at work)


I got all the search results I expected: handling of strings in C, and a tiny bit of C++ thrown in. What do you get?


Haha! People accidentally leaking their porn search habits always makes for great internet humour.

I, too, get C-lang strings for "c strings" (with or without quotes) and C++, Java, the STRING bio database for just "string" or "strings".


I assure you it doesn't line up with my porn search habits. It came up one day when searching and now it doesn't seem to come up (unless I click on image search), who knows how googles algorithm works?


It used to come up, now doesn't seem to unless I look in image search?

It's basically a highly impractical piece of women's (and maybe men?) underwear that's supposed to be "sexy" but is more WTF

https://www.bustle.com/articles/34628-i-wore-the-c-string-so...


I thought this was going to be a link to a technical article suggesting the merge of vim and emacs... Vimacs.



you mean spacemacs.


Heh I saw this the other day and just assumed that easter egg had always been there.


I have to turn adblock off to see many of these. Strange.


Meanwhile, nano doesn't get that treatment


"Steamed hams" is a great one :)


"I love emacs. Extremely powerful. Just lacks a decent editor"




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