6 ms·

Over the years, we (@anishathalye, @jjgo, @jonhoo) have helped teach several classes at MIT, and over and over we have seen that many students have limited know

by Jonhoo 7y ago

Over the years, we (@anishathalye, @jjgo, @jonhoo) have helped teach several classes at MIT, and over and over we have seen that many students have limited knowledge of the tools available to them. Computers were built to automate manual tasks, yet students often perform repetitive tasks by hand or fail to take full advantage of powerful tools such as version control and text editors. Common examples include holding the down arrow key for 30 seconds to scroll to the bottom of a large file in Vim, or using the nuclear approach to fix a Git repository (https://xkcd.com/1597/ https://xkcd.com/1597/). At least at MIT, these topics are not taught as part of the university curriculum: students are never shown how to use these tools, or at least not how to use them efficiently, and thus waste time and effort on tasks that should be simple. The standard CS curriculum is missing critical topics about the computing ecosystem that could make students’ lives significantly easier. To help mitigate this, we ran a short lecture series during MIT’s Independent Activities Period (IAP) that covered all the topics we consider crucial to be an effective computer scientist and programmer. We’ve published lecture notes and videos in the hopes that people outside MIT find these resources useful. To offer a bit of historical perspective on the class: we taught this class for the first time last year, when we called it “Hacker Tools” (there was some great discussion about last year’s class here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19078281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19078281). We found the feedback from here and elsewhere incredibly helpful. Taking that into account, we changed the lecture topics a bit, spent more lecture time on some of the core topics, wrote better exercises, and recorded high-quality lecture videos using a fancy lecture capture system (and this hacky DSL for editing multi-track lecture videos, which we thought some of you would find amusing: https://github.com/missing-semester/videos https://github.com/missing-semester/videos). We’d love to hear any insights or feedback you may have, so that we can run an even better class next year! -- Anish, Jose, and Jon

floatrock 7y ago
Love this. I remember it wasn't until junior year when I was reading about the theoretical underpinnings of the unix kernel that I learned what the pipe operator I'd been copy-pasting on psets really did. I mean, it's great to learn those underpinnings, but most course 6 classes assumed you already knew all these tools... if it wasn't theory, it wasn't their responsibility to teach it. "Missing Semester" describes it perfectly. Wish there had been something like this back in my day... I remember I felt as if I had learned all the theory behind fluid mechanics but didn't know the first thing about fixing a leaky faucet in my kitchen. Keep up the good work!
ericd 7y ago
Ha some MIT alum friends and I were just talking about how great it would be if something like this existed, rather than having it be left to one’s first years as a junior engineer in a company. Thanks for doing this, it’s sorely needed.
foobarian 7y ago
Since you mention scrolling using key repeat - it truly is painful to watch someone do it on default settings. And there are usually better ways to do that sort of thing. But sometimes, there is no substitute: going to the right spot in the middle of a word/line, moving around a page, browser title bars, etc. Here's the kicker though: most keyboard repeat rate settings around have a maximum that is pretty much unusable! But you can fix it thusly: xset r rate 180 60 When I work on my computer it's like driving a Porsche. When I sit at someone else's it's like I tripped over a door threshold. There are ways to adjust this on OSX too but it's a lot more touchy. Haven't attempted on Windows.
- aspaceman 7y ago
  Personally this is what I choose to use the mouse for - even in Vim. A scroll wheel is nicely intuitive for descending a buffer.
- robterrell 7y ago
  > There are ways to adjust this on OSX too but it's a lot more touchy System preferences > Keyboard > Key repeat rate Adjust the slider to your liking. Works in every app. It's been there since 1984, but to the topic, not many users poke around in system settings anymore. If you want faster than the slider allows, try this from the command line: defaults write -g KeyRepeat -int 1
  - foobarian 7y ago
    That's what I mean by more touchy. I think you also can't do this without messing with system integrity protection. And, "1" is the lowest it can go which is not that low IMO. :)
- arendtio 7y ago
  Well, I think the point was a different one... more like press G
msaharia 7y ago
Hi, how are you getting the keystrokes you type in to overlay on the video? Is there a tool you're using for this? Would be very helpful if you could make it.
- anishathalye 7y ago
  On macOS, we used this excellent open-source software called KeyCastr: https://github.com/keycastr/keycastr https://github.com/keycastr/keycastr (we used this e.g. in the text editors lecture)
brlewis 7y ago
My feedback is to keep doing what you're doing. Some people will talk about how this kind of mundane training might not be relevant some years later. By the same reasoning students shouldn't learn the layout of their campus or how to add and drop courses, because those skills won't be relevant after they graduate. Keep helping students not waste time now on tasks that should be simple.
kamaal 7y ago
Learning to use the editor macros well, could save anyone lots of effort typing. And should definitely be in your course.
ip26 7y ago
"I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it." -- Bill Gates Some people just accept absurd drudgery interacting with computers; it never even occurs to them to seek an easier way. But if you can teach the students to be "lazy" when it comes to that kind of repetitive drudgery, they'll be set for life.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  I think the problem is more a lack of imagination. They just keep doing things the way they always have. I seem to have a surplus both of "there has to be a better way"-itis, and some skill in finding such ways.
  - honestoHeminway 7y ago
    It starts with the self-perception of ones work as pure drugery. From there it moves into all fields. Monotonous drugery is preferable to attentionneeding drudgery.
  - onei 7y ago
    I call it a lack of curiosity instead of a lack of imagination. Both are useful, but to me imagination is more about coming up with new solutions than understanding how something that already exists can be bent to your will.
    - nkrisc 7y ago
      I think they go hand-in-hand. You have to have some imagination about how something must work (however off-base) to be curious enough to find out how it really works. It often seems to me that people who aren't curious lack it because they can't even imagine something different than what is in front of them. They don't wonder how a car works because they can't even begin to deduce how it might work, from the observable outside in, because they lack the imagination to make those deductions. Someone who's curious might see a car and think, "How does this work? I can see the wheels spin and propel it forward, but something must be making those wheels turn. How do they all spin at the same time? What turns the push of the pedal into making the wheels turn?" etc. I see curiosity and imagination as two sides of the same personality trait expressed in different ways.
choppaface 7y ago
I’d recommend Docker / virtual machines as its own top-level module. There’s essentially no better way than containers to make projects portable and reproducible, and containers are now essential for pretty much any production system. I’ve taught docker to a few dozen people and while they hate it at first (the learning curve can be steep) they love it in the end. Also wish this course covered bazel, maybe in potpourri. Make is important and bazel isn’t standard but bazel is pretty important for large C++ projects. Docker and bazel both have fairly complicated interfaces and the time set aside for a course like this is the perfect time to play with them.
inson 7y ago
I'd recommend making a course on how to create a proper Makefile, from the beginning to the advanced level.
- joatmon-snoo 7y ago
  Makefiles are worse shell scripts. /religion I do agree with the spirit of this though. There's a big difference between "click a button in your IDE" to compile and learning about all the code-ish things that go into a real software project: * choosing a build system (and package system too, I guess?) * setting up CI * static analysis * setting up CD * config-as-code for managing the state of prod * staging environments? * production monitoring * production alerting
dybber 7y ago
We previously had the same problem at University of Copenhagen, it was called "the hidden curriculum" among students. When the undergraduate programme was reformed a few years ago these subjects where integrated into various courses, so they could be taught in a learning-by-doing fashion. As part of the first programming and problem-solving class (F#), we also teach LaTeX, Emacs and basic use of the command line, as part of a project-based software engineering course (second semester) Git is used extensively, and so on.
- omarhaneef 7y ago
  Um, quick question: so should one use Emacs as the University of Copenhagen, or VIM as MIT is teaching? (Just kidding)
  - Anthony-G 7y ago
    That question has already been answered: https://missing.csail.mit.edu/2020/qa/#vim-vs-emacs https://missing.csail.mit.edu/2020/qa/#vim-vs-emacs :)
huijzer 7y ago
I think this is an amazing course and indeed missing. I learned the things presented in the course only after graduating CS and working at a company! They (rightly so) thought I was somewhat of a fool because I preferred to use Windows. One thing on the data wrangling. I do think that the Linux tools are powerful, but would like to give some credits to R here. For example, merging tables (similar to SQL joins) is available in the standard library. This in combination with R Markdown for visualization makes it much more easy to use than Linux CLI tools.
fuzzy2 7y ago
That’s cool. Now, on to my possibly unpopular opinion: This isn’t what computer science is about. In fact, you don’t even need to use a computer to do computer science. Sure, some stuff you learn in CS can make you a better software engineer. CS cannot make you a software engineer. CS can definitely not make you adept at using computers and neither should it. That’s something earlier education institutions must tackle. It’s always good to have optional courses for various topics of interest. _Requiring_ students to learn, say, MS Office (I had to), is just plain ridiculous.
- Nitramp 7y ago
  Science doesn't abstractly drop from the heavens, fully formed. Every science has practical enablers that are required to get stuff done. Astronomers use telescopes, physicists/chemists/etc use lab equipment, Mathematicians use various notations and other tricks (and nowadays proof assistants) to make their job easier. MS Office might not be practical for computer science (also note how the OP doesn't list that), but learning how to write your papers in latex might, and knowing how to use a shell certainly is. E.g. if you'd like students to learn about type theory, they will need to experiment with your compiler. You cannot expect students to miraculously be proficient in this, and explicitly teaching them (and requiring it as a prerequisite course to signal that yes, it's important) can turn weeks of frustration followed by a huge dropout rate into a productive course.
  - swiley 7y ago
    They should be writing them in asciidoc (or even markdown) and using style sheets if they really need complex formatting!!! (although at least latex is decent at typesetting and has nice defaults.)
    - Nitramp 7y ago
      Yes. I intended that more as an abstract example for a tool that's useful to do science, but clearly not a science in of itself[1]. Though latex might still come in handy once you actually want to submit papers to journals, or for a thesis. YMMV. [1] then again, if I remember my feeble attempts to write latex macros, maybe the emergent behaviour of common latex packages would be a good research subject? ;-)
slumdev 7y ago
You use Vim in your example. Get your students out of it and into something like IntelliJ IDEA or VS Code or (at a bare minimum) Eclipse.
- 0x445442 7y ago
  I think it's valuable to start with Vim, especially for non JVM or CLR languages. Learning Vim as a first step will allow the students to easily navigate and edit code on remote servers. Then, when working on a code base like Java or C#, they can install the Vim plugin for their IDE and have the advantage of a superior editing tool to go along with the tooling the IDE provides.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Or preferably all of the above and Vim, and also CodeBlocks and KEIL just in case. Really? There's a point where you get to learn your IDE...
- swiley 7y ago
  Why? What’s wrong with vim, gdb, and some static analysis tools like cscope and a linter? IDEs confuse people, a lot of them start to think you can’t have the compiler/debugger/build automations without the editor and start doing stupid things because of that.
- missjellyfish 7y ago
  Unpopular Opinion: IDEs suck when teaching people programming. A simple Text editor, the simpler the better, is all we need, combined with a compiler. Modern IDEs introduce a boatload of completely irrelevant concepts and complexity that just adds to the confusion. Doesn't matter which one you use. If I was to design a CS101 course, I'd do away with Java (which is the language of choice at my university) as well. I don't know what would be the replacement; vala looks nice but the resources are lacking. My main points in choosing a language to teach would be that I can do OO in it while not needing everything to be encapsulated in classes. Also, the language shouldn't care about whitespace, because if I'm teaching a few hundred students, I'm not going to debug a boatload of mixed tabs and spaces issues. Also, my CS101 course would be about debugging as much as about programming. Including stuff like "here is some source code, that's the observed bug, submit a corrected version by midnight x-y-zzzz and describe how you debugged it in bullet points". Unfortunately, plagiarism on these types of assignments makes them very much useless in the real world where grades depend on that.
tikiman163 7y ago
I read through the article, and a lot of what you've got looks really useful. Your explanation of GIT and source control is especially valuable. These are all pretty much skills a good programmer should have, but I would make one exception. Personally, I like and have frequently used VIM. It's a useful tool to know how to use if you need to edit text files on a GUI-less system. However, I have yet to meet a single programmer with any ability to work as a team member that chooses to use VIM while using an OS with a desktop environment. VIM does have an interesting and valuable ideology, but that ideology isn't perfect and I worry that exposing new programmers to only one command line text editor and itss specific ideology might provide too narrow of a perspective. It might be a good idea to alsi present the ideologies behind other command line text editing approaches such as perl scripting and regex in order to update many files in order to widen their perspective and consider what they need to do while selecting the tool to use.
- lwb 7y ago
  Lots of people use Vim in a desktop environment. At Facebook I would guess that something like 20% of software engineers use it on a daily basis. It’s still an incredibly powerful editor with lots of practical application and it’s constantly being updated. If you have the right plugins it can be an order of magnitude more productive than an IDE.
dirtydroog 7y ago
We shouldn't really be encouraging people to program in vim. I mean, an 80 char line length limit is very 1995. People have massive monitors now.
- godshatter 7y ago
  Your entire file can be one line in vim, regardless of it's size.
godshatter 7y ago
I would go one step even more basic and teach touch typing. It amazes me when I watch someone code by laboriously copying some other code from somewhere else, from a full code snippet to a single variable name, paste it in and begrudgingly type what needs to be typed, slowly. The thought that always goes through my mind when I see this is "this is your interface to code, people, shouldn't you spend a little bit of time at least trying to master it?" Forget vim, if people just learned to type they could be twice as productive in simple notepad. Vim (which I use) raises this to another level still.

by Jonhoo 7y ago

floatrock 7y ago

Love this. I remember it wasn't until junior year when I was reading about the theoretical underpinnings of the unix kernel that I learned what the pipe operator I'd been copy-pasting on psets really did. I mean, it's great to learn those underpinnings, but most course 6 classes assumed you already knew all these tools... if it wasn't theory, it wasn't their responsibility to teach it. "Missing Semester" describes it perfectly. Wish there had been something like this back in my day... I remember I felt as if I had learned all the theory behind fluid mechanics but didn't know the first thing about fixing a leaky faucet in my kitchen. Keep up the good work!

ericd 7y ago

Ha some MIT alum friends and I were just talking about how great it would be if something like this existed, rather than having it be left to one’s first years as a junior engineer in a company. Thanks for doing this, it’s sorely needed.

foobarian 7y ago

Since you mention scrolling using key repeat - it truly is painful to watch someone do it on default settings. And there are usually better ways to do that sort of thing. But sometimes, there is no substitute: going to the right spot in the middle of a word/line, moving around a page, browser title bars, etc. Here's the kicker though: most keyboard repeat rate settings around have a maximum that is pretty much unusable! But you can fix it thusly: xset r rate 180 60 When I work on my computer it's like driving a Porsche. When I sit at someone else's it's like I tripped over a door threshold. There are ways to adjust this on OSX too but it's a lot more touchy. Haven't attempted on Windows.

aspaceman 7y ago
Personally this is what I choose to use the mouse for - even in Vim. A scroll wheel is nicely intuitive for descending a buffer.
robterrell 7y ago
> There are ways to adjust this on OSX too but it's a lot more touchy System preferences > Keyboard > Key repeat rate Adjust the slider to your liking. Works in every app. It's been there since 1984, but to the topic, not many users poke around in system settings anymore. If you want faster than the slider allows, try this from the command line: defaults write -g KeyRepeat -int 1
- foobarian 7y ago
  That's what I mean by more touchy. I think you also can't do this without messing with system integrity protection. And, "1" is the lowest it can go which is not that low IMO. :)
arendtio 7y ago
Well, I think the point was a different one... more like press G

msaharia 7y ago

Hi, how are you getting the keystrokes you type in to overlay on the video? Is there a tool you're using for this? Would be very helpful if you could make it.

anishathalye 7y ago
On macOS, we used this excellent open-source software called KeyCastr: https://github.com/keycastr/keycastr https://github.com/keycastr/keycastr (we used this e.g. in the text editors lecture)

brlewis 7y ago

My feedback is to keep doing what you're doing. Some people will talk about how this kind of mundane training might not be relevant some years later. By the same reasoning students shouldn't learn the layout of their campus or how to add and drop courses, because those skills won't be relevant after they graduate. Keep helping students not waste time now on tasks that should be simple.

kamaal 7y ago

Learning to use the editor macros well, could save anyone lots of effort typing. And should definitely be in your course.

ip26 7y ago

"I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it." -- Bill Gates Some people just accept absurd drudgery interacting with computers; it never even occurs to them to seek an easier way. But if you can teach the students to be "lazy" when it comes to that kind of repetitive drudgery, they'll be set for life.

BurningFrog 7y ago
I think the problem is more a lack of imagination. They just keep doing things the way they always have. I seem to have a surplus both of "there has to be a better way"-itis, and some skill in finding such ways.
- honestoHeminway 7y ago
  It starts with the self-perception of ones work as pure drugery. From there it moves into all fields. Monotonous drugery is preferable to attentionneeding drudgery.
- onei 7y ago
  I call it a lack of curiosity instead of a lack of imagination. Both are useful, but to me imagination is more about coming up with new solutions than understanding how something that already exists can be bent to your will.
  - nkrisc 7y ago
    I think they go hand-in-hand. You have to have some imagination about how something must work (however off-base) to be curious enough to find out how it really works. It often seems to me that people who aren't curious lack it because they can't even imagine something different than what is in front of them. They don't wonder how a car works because they can't even begin to deduce how it might work, from the observable outside in, because they lack the imagination to make those deductions. Someone who's curious might see a car and think, "How does this work? I can see the wheels spin and propel it forward, but something must be making those wheels turn. How do they all spin at the same time? What turns the push of the pedal into making the wheels turn?" etc. I see curiosity and imagination as two sides of the same personality trait expressed in different ways.

choppaface 7y ago

I’d recommend Docker / virtual machines as its own top-level module. There’s essentially no better way than containers to make projects portable and reproducible, and containers are now essential for pretty much any production system. I’ve taught docker to a few dozen people and while they hate it at first (the learning curve can be steep) they love it in the end. Also wish this course covered bazel, maybe in potpourri. Make is important and bazel isn’t standard but bazel is pretty important for large C++ projects. Docker and bazel both have fairly complicated interfaces and the time set aside for a course like this is the perfect time to play with them.

inson 7y ago

I'd recommend making a course on how to create a proper Makefile, from the beginning to the advanced level.

joatmon-snoo 7y ago
Makefiles are worse shell scripts. /religion I do agree with the spirit of this though. There's a big difference between "click a button in your IDE" to compile and learning about all the code-ish things that go into a real software project: * choosing a build system (and package system too, I guess?) * setting up CI * static analysis * setting up CD * config-as-code for managing the state of prod * staging environments? * production monitoring * production alerting

dybber 7y ago

We previously had the same problem at University of Copenhagen, it was called "the hidden curriculum" among students. When the undergraduate programme was reformed a few years ago these subjects where integrated into various courses, so they could be taught in a learning-by-doing fashion. As part of the first programming and problem-solving class (F#), we also teach LaTeX, Emacs and basic use of the command line, as part of a project-based software engineering course (second semester) Git is used extensively, and so on.

omarhaneef 7y ago
Um, quick question: so should one use Emacs as the University of Copenhagen, or VIM as MIT is teaching? (Just kidding)
- Anthony-G 7y ago
  That question has already been answered: https://missing.csail.mit.edu/2020/qa/#vim-vs-emacs https://missing.csail.mit.edu/2020/qa/#vim-vs-emacs :)

huijzer 7y ago

I think this is an amazing course and indeed missing. I learned the things presented in the course only after graduating CS and working at a company! They (rightly so) thought I was somewhat of a fool because I preferred to use Windows. One thing on the data wrangling. I do think that the Linux tools are powerful, but would like to give some credits to R here. For example, merging tables (similar to SQL joins) is available in the standard library. This in combination with R Markdown for visualization makes it much more easy to use than Linux CLI tools.

fuzzy2 7y ago

That’s cool. Now, on to my possibly unpopular opinion: This isn’t what computer science is about. In fact, you don’t even need to use a computer to do computer science. Sure, some stuff you learn in CS can make you a better software engineer. CS cannot make you a software engineer. CS can definitely not make you adept at using computers and neither should it. That’s something earlier education institutions must tackle. It’s always good to have optional courses for various topics of interest. _Requiring_ students to learn, say, MS Office (I had to), is just plain ridiculous.

Nitramp 7y ago
Science doesn't abstractly drop from the heavens, fully formed. Every science has practical enablers that are required to get stuff done. Astronomers use telescopes, physicists/chemists/etc use lab equipment, Mathematicians use various notations and other tricks (and nowadays proof assistants) to make their job easier. MS Office might not be practical for computer science (also note how the OP doesn't list that), but learning how to write your papers in latex might, and knowing how to use a shell certainly is. E.g. if you'd like students to learn about type theory, they will need to experiment with your compiler. You cannot expect students to miraculously be proficient in this, and explicitly teaching them (and requiring it as a prerequisite course to signal that yes, it's important) can turn weeks of frustration followed by a huge dropout rate into a productive course.
- swiley 7y ago
  They should be writing them in asciidoc (or even markdown) and using style sheets if they really need complex formatting!!! (although at least latex is decent at typesetting and has nice defaults.)
  - Nitramp 7y ago
    Yes. I intended that more as an abstract example for a tool that's useful to do science, but clearly not a science in of itself[1]. Though latex might still come in handy once you actually want to submit papers to journals, or for a thesis. YMMV. [1] then again, if I remember my feeble attempts to write latex macros, maybe the emergent behaviour of common latex packages would be a good research subject? ;-)

slumdev 7y ago

You use Vim in your example. Get your students out of it and into something like IntelliJ IDEA or VS Code or (at a bare minimum) Eclipse.

0x445442 7y ago
I think it's valuable to start with Vim, especially for non JVM or CLR languages. Learning Vim as a first step will allow the students to easily navigate and edit code on remote servers. Then, when working on a code base like Java or C#, they can install the Vim plugin for their IDE and have the advantage of a superior editing tool to go along with the tooling the IDE provides.
AstralStorm 7y ago
Or preferably all of the above and Vim, and also CodeBlocks and KEIL just in case. Really? There's a point where you get to learn your IDE...
swiley 7y ago
Why? What’s wrong with vim, gdb, and some static analysis tools like cscope and a linter? IDEs confuse people, a lot of them start to think you can’t have the compiler/debugger/build automations without the editor and start doing stupid things because of that.
missjellyfish 7y ago
Unpopular Opinion: IDEs suck when teaching people programming. A simple Text editor, the simpler the better, is all we need, combined with a compiler. Modern IDEs introduce a boatload of completely irrelevant concepts and complexity that just adds to the confusion. Doesn't matter which one you use. If I was to design a CS101 course, I'd do away with Java (which is the language of choice at my university) as well. I don't know what would be the replacement; vala looks nice but the resources are lacking. My main points in choosing a language to teach would be that I can do OO in it while not needing everything to be encapsulated in classes. Also, the language shouldn't care about whitespace, because if I'm teaching a few hundred students, I'm not going to debug a boatload of mixed tabs and spaces issues. Also, my CS101 course would be about debugging as much as about programming. Including stuff like "here is some source code, that's the observed bug, submit a corrected version by midnight x-y-zzzz and describe how you debugged it in bullet points". Unfortunately, plagiarism on these types of assignments makes them very much useless in the real world where grades depend on that.

tikiman163 7y ago

I read through the article, and a lot of what you've got looks really useful. Your explanation of GIT and source control is especially valuable. These are all pretty much skills a good programmer should have, but I would make one exception. Personally, I like and have frequently used VIM. It's a useful tool to know how to use if you need to edit text files on a GUI-less system. However, I have yet to meet a single programmer with any ability to work as a team member that chooses to use VIM while using an OS with a desktop environment. VIM does have an interesting and valuable ideology, but that ideology isn't perfect and I worry that exposing new programmers to only one command line text editor and itss specific ideology might provide too narrow of a perspective. It might be a good idea to alsi present the ideologies behind other command line text editing approaches such as perl scripting and regex in order to update many files in order to widen their perspective and consider what they need to do while selecting the tool to use.

lwb 7y ago
Lots of people use Vim in a desktop environment. At Facebook I would guess that something like 20% of software engineers use it on a daily basis. It’s still an incredibly powerful editor with lots of practical application and it’s constantly being updated. If you have the right plugins it can be an order of magnitude more productive than an IDE.

dirtydroog 7y ago

We shouldn't really be encouraging people to program in vim. I mean, an 80 char line length limit is very 1995. People have massive monitors now.

godshatter 7y ago
Your entire file can be one line in vim, regardless of it's size.

godshatter 7y ago

I would go one step even more basic and teach touch typing. It amazes me when I watch someone code by laboriously copying some other code from somewhere else, from a full code snippet to a single variable name, paste it in and begrudgingly type what needs to be typed, slowly. The thought that always goes through my mind when I see this is "this is your interface to code, people, shouldn't you spend a little bit of time at least trying to master it?" Forget vim, if people just learned to type they could be twice as productive in simple notepad. Vim (which I use) raises this to another level still.