Nano is the tool that people use when they don’t have a need for TUI editors in general and therefore don’t want to have to memorize how people with teletypes decided things should have been done 75 years ago and who also don’t want to get dragged into endless pointless bickering arguments about which set of greybeards was objectively right about their sets of preferences.

I’m glad people enjoy the editors they use and also I just wanna change a single fuckin line in a config file every once in a while without needing to consult a reference guide.

How about micro

Bruh 😂 the Emacs user community absolutely constantly shit on Vim users. When they added Vi(m) bindings they literally named it ‘evil mode’, and they constantly make fun of people who use it, and spacemacs, and the latest flavor of (neo)vi(m), and all the extensions necessary to make vim halfway useful as an ide, etc etc etc.

I regularly fix my bashrc file with Notepad. I run it in Wine because I cbf to RealVNC from my Windows CE media server.

(n.b: None of this is real, I wrote it to upset people, I’m sorry)

Integrated Mevelopment Environment. You should have known this

That acronym usually stands for “Input Method Editor” and describes the program that makes people able to type east Asian characters with a usual keyboard.

日本語は楽しいです。

The M stands for beefcake

Integrated Memeing Environment

VScodium is FOSS though

?

Just tried it in my terminal and I couldn’t exit, lol

ln -sf /bin/nano /bin/vi

Edit a file, writing a quick shell script or whatever in the terminal. Nano is great. I don’t see any use in learning vim or emacs. If I need something more I’m going use a gui editor anyway.

Don’t get triggered anyone it’s just my preference

There are dozens of us!

nah you’re wrong

Same. Stage 1 install will forever be a core memory for me.

They hate’us cause they anus.

you can change that really easily

Not in rescue mode. If you can’t mount your root partition because something was fudged in /etc/fstab, for example, you may be stuck in recovery and depending on your distribution, it may not have nano in that minimalist mode.

For me it also happens when I install a VM of Debian using the small image, on my dedicated server in a data center. The company hosting the server requires a special network configuration and AFAIK, there’s only vi. So i need to use the console to access the VM and from there, edit /etc/network/something with vi to setup the network. Once done I can reboot and install the rest of the software over the network, including nano.

I’ve been using Linux for more than two decades. Before nano I was using pico, but it also required to have pine/alpine installed. So knowing the basics of vi has often been helpful over the years for me.

Maybe it’s because I like tinkering with VMs and SBCs, and most people will not encounter situations where they don’t have nano, but it can happen. And you’ll be glad to know at least “i” and “:wq!”.

In a professional context, you might end up on servers that don’t have nano installed, but do have vi. Or if you’re helping out a friend on their laptop, they might not have the same software as you. Or if you often end up tinkering with random devices and/or setting up new systems it might be tedious to install the same applications every time.

It’s basically an argument for learning the very basics of the most common editors so you have flexibility no matter where you end up. Even when you have the ability to download and install your preferred software, it’s still an extra step that might not be desirable for a variety of reasons. But if it’s just your own personal device, I see no problem with just installing whatever you prefer and running with it.

EDIT: Personally, I find that I don’t end up using those other editors often enough to remember the abstruse commands of tools like vim, so I’m not worried about it. When it does happen, 99% of the time I can just whip out a smartphone and look up the directions for the n-dozenth time.

haha, same. do you use vimium as well?

Can you use a mouse in nano? I always just use the arrow keys, or page up/down and home/end

I mostly use vim but I barely use the jkl; to navigate the document.

cat pipeing is safer though.

foobar > file and your file is gone.

<file foobar

M-x M-c butterfly

This makes it seem like jerking off to MILF porn is hard because there is a learning curve

It is easier after you learn basics. Learning is not easy, but usage is.

Every day in my case, except holidays.

Yes it’s so outdated that mostly every IDE offers usage with its keybindings.

VIM may have been a very useful tool 20 or 30 years ago, but today it’s nothing else but a tool for one’s sense of superiority. It’s the vinyl of editors.

So, because you don’t understand something, it’s outdated?

If you have to type that much code in a terminal, your infrastructure is outdated. Simple as that.

Ok, I can see you have no idea what you’re talking about.

I actually use VIM bindings in PyCharm, slightly cursed but actually works really well and meshes fairly nicely with the other IDE shortcuts. Being able to use it in any terminal is a nice bonus.

You can learn Emacs in one day. Every day.

I’m a vim user and I would say it’s not. It’s very powerful, but only once you become familiar with the commands.

Nano is a better default for the average user because it works in a way most users would expect for a text editor to work.

Honestly, these days it’s pretty simple. The thing you need to remember is that you do not need to know EVERYTHING all at once. Learn a little bit, use it, keep what you use, discard what you don’t, get it in muscle memory, and learn a bit more. Very quickly you’ll be zooming through vim.

You can learn the basics, and go from there- the basics of vim (which imo everyone should know- vi is often the fallback editor), and then you can just casually learn stuff as you go.

Here’s the basics for modern default/standard vim: Arrow keys move you around like you expect in all ‘modes’ (there’s some arguments about if you should be using arrow keys in the vim community- for now, consider them a crutch that lets you learn other things). There’s two ‘modes’- command mode, and edit mode.

Edit mode acts like a standard, traditional text editor, though a lot of your keybinds (e.g. ctrl-c/ctrl-v) don’t work.

Press escape to go back into command mode (in command mode, esc does nothing- esc is always safe to use. If you get lost/trapped/are confused, just keep hitting escape and you’ll drop into command mode). You start vim in command mode. Press i to go into edit mode at your current cursor position.

To exit vim entirely, go to command mode (esc), and type :wq<enter>.

‘:’ is ‘issue command string’,

‘w’ is ‘write’, aka save,

‘q’ is quit.

In other words, ‘:wq’ is ‘save and quit’

‘:q’ is quit without saving, ‘:w’ is save and don’t quit. Logical.

Depending on your terminal, you can probably select text with your mouse and have it be copied and then pasted with shift-ins in edit mode, which is a terminal thing and not a vim thing, because vim ties into it natively.

That gets you started with basically all the same features as nano, except they work in a minimal environment and you can build them up to start taking advantage of command mode, which is where the power and speed of vim start coming into play.

For example ‘i’ puts you in edit mode on the spot- capital i puts you in command mode at the beginning of the line. a is edit mode after your spot- capital A is edit mode at the end of the current line.

Do you need these to use vim? Nope. Once you learn them, start using them, and have them as muscle memory, is it vastly faster to use? Yes. And there’s hundreds of keybinds like that, all of which are fairly logical once you know the logic behind them- ‘insert’ and ‘after’ for i/a, for example.

Fair warning, vim is old enough that the logic may seem arcane sometimes- e.g. instead of ‘copy and paste’ vim has ‘yank and put,’ because copy/paste didn’t exist yet, so the keybinds for copy/paste are y and p.

Vim makes it easy to edit text in complicated ways, once you’ve learned it.

Vim is not easy to learn nor intuitive.

It is simple and compounding.

You might not ever edit enough text to ever need to learn a new skillset to edit text. If that’s the case, use nano.

But if you do find yourself editing a lot of text, consider trying vimtutor.

It takes 20 minutes and you’ll be proficient enough to match nano’s efficiency ceiling.

VIM is like drugs. Easy to start, hard to quit.

Not necessarily! I always run ln -s '/usr/bin/$EDITOR' $(which $EDITOR) after a fresh install, so I have a valid executable on the path called $EDITOR.

Of course, then I have to make sure to add export EDITOR=\$EDITOR to my .bashrc. (Obviously.)

Or you can preinstall micro like you preinstall everything else 😅

You can have mouse support with nano. Alt-m toggles it on or off.

And all the shortcuts are SANE, not the weird thing of nano