Fair, but there’s a worse experience possible.

For a time, many people’s first encounter with vi was when it auto-opened a temporary editor to ask them to submit a commit message for the git command they just ran.

This experience skips the vi “welcome” screen, because a file is open.

As a bonus challenge, git did not inform the user what editor is in use, and the user had no particular reason to even expect an editor to appear, based on what they were just doing.

None of this was the fault of vi, really. But it was a terrible introduction.

It got better when various operating systems changed their default command line editor to nano, and git added some helpful adjustments - “if certain settings are not configured, assume a new user and show verbose welcome messages”.