I was a TA for an introductory CS class that taught C++ and, in passing, vi. A hour before one assignment was due, a student showed up in a panic. “I just had it working but then the computer corrupted my file. Look! Can I have an extension?” The other TA and I smirked: What a lame excuse! We offered some generic advice about starting earlier and visiting office hours. He left in a huff.
A few minutes later, a second student appeared with the same story, and then a third and fourth.
We eventually tracked the problem down to some handwritten notes, where someone had written a largish :x for “save and quit.” The students were doing things like spamming :X (since it didn’t seem to respond the first time—-and it was over a sluggish ssh connection) or a reflexive quit-and-compile cycle. I think we eventually recovered one or two assignments by guessing what they might have done.
We obviously apologized profusely and the next class started with a discussion of :x versus :X—-and emacs!
He was legitimately confused and panicked and we could have been more understanding (especially since this turned out not to be a one-off thing). It’s good to be kind.
The editor thing wasn’t a big deal: a few minutes of “Beware :X! If you no longer trust vi, feel free to use emacs or nano, which are also installed on our system. They work a bit differently [details, resources]. You can write your code locally too, but if so, make sure it runs on our system with the autograder. Here are a few options for that too.”
It sounds like the "sluggish ssh connection" may have played a role here--imagine pressing ":X" like you think you should, but nothing happens, so you press enter a few times to see if the console is responsive.
I was a TA for an introductory CS class that taught C++ and, in passing, vi. A hour before one assignment was due, a student showed up in a panic. “I just had it working but then the computer corrupted my file. Look! Can I have an extension?” The other TA and I smirked: What a lame excuse! We offered some generic advice about starting earlier and visiting office hours. He left in a huff.
A few minutes later, a second student appeared with the same story, and then a third and fourth.
We eventually tracked the problem down to some handwritten notes, where someone had written a largish :x for “save and quit.” The students were doing things like spamming :X (since it didn’t seem to respond the first time—-and it was over a sluggish ssh connection) or a reflexive quit-and-compile cycle. I think we eventually recovered one or two assignments by guessing what they might have done.
We obviously apologized profusely and the next class started with a discussion of :x versus :X—-and emacs!