Nano has already supplanted the great EMacs and Vim as the most popular text editor of all linux distros, for though it has many omissions in functionality it scores over the older, more complete programs in two important respects. First, it is slightly simpler; and secondly it has the text “^ Exit” inscribed in highlighted text on its footer
EDIT : This sees to be going over some people’s heads. It’s a hitchiker’s guide to the galaxy reference.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions . . . it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
I’m in the “been working with Linux since the 90s” gang so I call vim vi and nano pico and when I started there was a coolness factor to be considered. I was incredibly uncool so I used whatever I wanted, including pico - I mean you used pine for email back in the day and the interface was nearly identical, so whatever.
But I did want to be at least a tiny bit cooler, so I learned vi in a fairly rudimentary fashion. I can edit, jump, delete, search, replace, copy and paste - oh, and I can exit. I’ve spent so much time using vi, that my brain doesn’t even have to think about exiting, not even whether I want to write or not. It just happens like second nature. It’s actually gotten to where nano seems unduly burdensome to me.
But really, I prefer an IDE for programming. CLI editors will always be for configuration files and shell scripts to me.
It is preinstalled and does what it needs to do. What else can I ask for?
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Emacs: “Sure, fuck it, why not.”
We shouldn’t ask ourselfs why we should do something, but if we could do something.
I like Nano; it lets me do what I need to do quickly, simply and efficiently.
Vi lets me jump to the place I need to be and make edits to a config file very sticky, simply, and efficiently. But all that came at the cost of the steep learning curve.
That’s why nano gets used more than vi/vim. In the past, the majority of people using terminal text editors were geeks and developers. Now the majority of people using the terminal text editors are more often casual users who have no use for putting the time and effort to learn vi/vim, especially because they have no need for the extended functionality
I don’t get you people. Proper copy/paste support is “extended functionality”? I beg to differ. This is basic functionality.
And no, single line copy/paste as offered by nano, or copy and paste through the terminal is not proper copy/paste.
Doesn’t matter if it’s not “proper” if it works.
Ah, I looked it up, it seems it actually has multiline copy/paste? Alt-A to mark the start of the text, Alt-6 to copy, Ctrl-U to paste. I’ll try it out next time I’m stuck in nano, thanks!
Blasphemy! Ctrl+k is multi line!
Sit down by the campfire my dear youngin’ and I’ll talk you tales of a terror myth called ASSEMBLY
OOOOOooOOOOOooOOO!
Machine language! Director memory addressing! AAAAAaaaaa!
MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Computers existed before the year 2000, you silly children…
Don’t be silly, grandpa. Everyone knows assembly doesn’t exist.
https://demoscene.assembly.org/
My favorite when I was a kid was absolutely, and without a doubt Second Reality by Future Crew. Full screen 3-D object rendering at 30 frames a second on a 486SX/25 CPU without a graphics card. in 1993
Future Crew, active in the early 90s, was a legendary group within the demoscene. They were acclaimed for their groundbreaking demos, like “Second Reality”, that demonstrated advanced programming, visual artistry, and music composition. These works set new standards for what was possible in real-time computer graphics, and they inspired countless artists and programmers around the world. Despite the group’s dissolution in 1994, Future Crew’s influence on the demoscene and the broader fields of graphics and game development is undeniable, and their legacy continues to inspire creativity in the digital world.
Fucking legendary.
And it fit on a floppy
Edit: I remember my friend Nick brought back a copy of Second Reality from ASSEMBLY 93, an annual convention of assembly developers where they would show off their programming prowess with these demos. Me and my friends got to see it before it hit the BBSs and Usenet. So fresh, yo!
I remember seen it in 1993 or 1994 in a friend’s PC with a Gravis Ultrasound. It was AMAZING. For comparison, the games of that year were almost all 16 bits platformers.
I think it took me over an hour to get my sound blaster pro configured just right
Here’s another reference from the era, let’s see if you get it:
“Did you bring the pages?”
It was from a game, but not a platformer
That’s incredible work.
And it makes me remember another gem of the period, Elite! I first played Elite Plus, but when I heard about the original, the magic of being able to navigate all those worlds in such a small format fired my imagination.
Just watched it all and goddamn. Rabbit hole time. Haven’t remembered what it was like back then for a long time. An age of marvels and wonder.
this functionality is only bloated and complicated for the person using a terminal a couple of times a year.
i say that while looking like this when i see any editor but
vimused:
but i know my co-worker looks at me like this, because he knows he only ever uses
vi:
Nano has proper copy/pate, it works identical to any text editor. Mark -> copy/cut -> paste
That’s true, if you had no GUI for an extended period, it’d be worth learning something that could do that. Although, other people are saying there’s a way in nano.
If you’re using a GUI, and working in an emulator, who cares if it’s not “proper”?
I use nano just because it’s the one that’s usually installed. if it was usually Vim, I would use that instead.
Exactly. I use nano because it’s always there, and if it’s not somehow? It’s in a preloaded repo. It’s just so simple and easy.
And I’ve used it to write code before, only several dozen lines at a time. And that’s BEFORE I knew about the option to use modern key commands. (Learned that today).
Now nano is unstoppable in my mind.
If I learned vim or whatever, then on top of learning it, I’d have to stop and install it every single time. Bleh. No thanks.
I see Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy parody, I updoot
If ind it quite funny that the majority of the posts are about the text editor and not about the blatant hitchhiker’s guide reference to the point where I had to specify it in the OP and then the thread exploded after that point.
Best local simple terminal text editor is micro.
It is insane how far using the same shortcuts literally everything else can get you in the world of terminal text editors and yet here we are
oh no, not again.
I’ve used Vim, NeoVim, Micro,
mg(1), JOE, and even MS Edit (both the original DOS version and the recent Rust clone). No matter how complex and tailored I wrote my config, though, the features I actually used were included in GNU nano and/or my command shell without any of the bugs, bloat, learning curve, or slop.Using it as my default just makes sense.
DOS edit was just an alias to qbasic /edit packaged in a .com
Nano is great for editing files. It is absolutely terrible for any amount of text processing or anything other than raw code copied from a tutorial
What sort of text processing? I rarely do this, so I usually just rely on things like
sed,ed,sort,uniq, and other shell commands to handle this.You guys do text processing on terminal editors?
was gonna say, I have IDEs and other dedicated programs for that
Of course. What do you think vim users do?
Fuck all? ;-)
Alternative joke: try to figure out how to exit
I understand why. People tried using vi/vim but couldn’t figure out how to exit the app. On the other hand, with Emacs, you need to use 4 keystrokes to do anything. It does not surprise me why nano is way used by default.
I think Vim is great if you use it everyday and know it inside out. For those of us who don’t, Nano is just easier, not least because it tells you in the UI how to exit it xD
Perhaps you’re right…or perhaps the Encyclopaedia Galactica is a better tool for navigating the galaxy if you’re willing to learn a trick or two about how to navigate it? No one ever argued that the Restaurant at the End of the Universe was the BEST restaurant, only that it was the one at the end.
Big fan of micro. Like nano, it’s non-modal, but unlike nano, it doesn’t need to print its shortcuts on the bottom because everyone already knows most of the shortcuts from almost every GUI editor. And it has inbuilt LSP support (TBH it’s a bit much at times, the UI is a bit too intrusive to (by default) complain every time you violate some style guideline).
Though that’s moot if you don’t have admin privileges on the box you’re working on.
nano -xmay be more to your liking then. Ornano -0if you like being terrified.Hints: Ctrl+X still works to quit. Alt-Z and Alt-X toggle the title and the help respectively.
You can also use the toggles in regular
nanoto hide one or the other if you’re bothered by them.The UI isn’t the issue with nano, it’s that it needs that kind of UI … you could memorize nano’s shortcuts, but it doesn’t have enough features to justify the effort.
What extra features do you think it ought to have?
It’s not that they want more features - it’s that in micro for instance copy is ctrl+c which everyone already knows, where in nano it’s different
Then you want
nano -/which uses the modern key bindings. They’ve been in nano for a while now.For historical reasons, it doesn’t use them by default.
Yup they could use
nano -/0, or they could just use micro.A note: I couldn’t find
-/referenced online easily though when I checked it is indeed there. On Macnanoredirects topicoby default which doesn’t have that either. I think it’s understandable someone would just choose to use microTo flog this dead horse just a bit longer, micro is nearly seven times the size of nano, and Apple are clearly doing it wrong. Pointing an old name at a new thing is fine as long as there’s backward compatibility, but a new name at an old thing that doesn’t support the same features is a disservice to the old thing, the new thing and the user.
Well, micro has syntax highlighting and LSP support, and vim is just really efficient at text editing … though nano’s feature set is honestly fine for what it is, I’d much rather it used well-known shortcuts by default.
Asking nano to use the modern keybinds by default is akin to insisting that Emacs run in evil mode by default. If you really must have it do that, set up a shell alias or put something in your .nanorc.
Also, nano has syntax highlighting. No LSP though. It’s an editor, not an IDE.
Maybe that explains the size difference I was talking about elsewhere.
I’m a vim stan. I love my vim. I still end up installing nano on all my machines. It’s honestly not even for me anymore, it’s for anyone else who happens to use it. Vim is great but it’s got a learning curve.
Often times I’ll just use vi, since it’s always there.
OK so… How long did it take you to learn to use vim? I mean, where you didn’t have to look anything up?
As a nano user, I’ve assumed it was in the 1 - 6 months range, but maybe it’s not that bad?
if you use something like Neovim/Lazyvim or NVChad it’s pretty easy to pick up as you can just hit space and it’ll tell you pretty much everything you can do. Neovim also includes a decent tutorial. you can pick up the absolute basics pretty quickly, easily within a day or so.
I had a job for a while where my main task for about a year was reviewing / editing configs on servers, in which I learned the basic functions of vim (opening, closing, seeking, copy / paste, find / replace, etc.) and used them enough to get them embedded in my memory.
I use vim less now, as I still prefer graphical editors with a visual file tree for most development tasks, but I still have the simple stuff ready at hand when I have to jump on a server and change a config file. I’ve “learned” new tricks with vim since then, but I have a harder time remembering them when I don’t use them every day, and I periodically come across vim functionality that I’ve encountered before but then forgot.
So, maybe six months isn’t so far off, but it’s not that I dedicated myself to studying and learning the full length and breadth of vim’s capabilities for that whole period. It’s more that I picked up the basics pretty quickly, maybe after a few days of getting settled, then repeated the basics in slightly varying contexts until they became rote, which took longer.
Like two or three weeks for most tasks. I still check the manual sometimes, it’s built in :)
Check out vimtutor if you wanna learn it fast
https://vimschool.netlify.app/introduction/vimtutor/
I oft reference the wikibooks page as well https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Vim
Also a die hard vim user. Once you get comfortable with it, it’s a very functional tool that will always be there for you, at least in vi form if nothing else.
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake moving away from ‘ed’ in the first place, and some said that even ‘ed’ had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left punch cards.
