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GNU Nano 4.0

nano-editor.org

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Re: GNU Nano 4.0

#31

Post by tyingq »

geuszb wrote: post #29

I'm sure nano/pico and the like are nice but to me there's two things a terminal editor can try to solve for: being nice, or bring ubiquitous. The nicest ones (say emacs) are way nicer than nano in terms of features, extensibility, etc. Now for being ubiquitous, nothing beats vi to date. I can't tell what nano is aiming for? EDIT I guess I had assumed that vi/vim was significantly more widespread than nano. Maybe tha…

Nano is somewhat ubiquitous in that it's the default editor on many Linux distros, including both Debian and Ubuntu. I often run "crontab -e" or "git commit" and end up in nano because I forgot to set $EDITOR on a new Linux box.

Edit: I suspect it's the default because it launches with visible instructions on how to exit. Launching Vim or Emacs strands a lot of new users.

Re: GNU Nano 4.0

#32

Post by lern_too_spel »

geuszb wrote: post #29

I'm sure nano/pico and the like are nice but to me there's two things a terminal editor can try to solve for: being nice, or bring ubiquitous. The nicest ones (say emacs) are way nicer than nano in terms of features, extensibility, etc. Now for being ubiquitous, nothing beats vi to date. I can't tell what nano is aiming for? EDIT I guess I had assumed that vi/vim was significantly more widespread than nano. Maybe tha…

Vi is ubiquitous. Vim is not.

Re: GNU Nano 4.0

#33

Post by geuszb »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #32
geuszb wrote: post #29

I'm sure nano/pico and the like are nice but to me there's two things a terminal editor can try to solve for: being nice, or bring ubiquitous. The nicest ones (say emacs) are way nicer than nano in terms of features, extensibility, etc. Now for being ubiquitous, nothing beats vi to date. I can't tell what nano is aiming for? EDIT I guess I had assumed that vi/vim was significantly more widespread than nano. Maybe tha…

Vi is ubiquitous. Vim is not.

Ah yes sorry fixed that

Re: GNU Nano 4.0

#34

Post by thomascgalvin »

geuszb wrote: post #29

I'm sure nano/pico and the like are nice but to me there's two things a terminal editor can try to solve for: being nice, or bring ubiquitous. The nicest ones (say emacs) are way nicer than nano in terms of features, extensibility, etc. Now for being ubiquitous, nothing beats vi to date. I can't tell what nano is aiming for? EDIT I guess I had assumed that vi/vim was significantly more widespread than nano. Maybe tha…

Legacy, more than anything else. Nano has been a thing for decades, and it will likely be a thing for decades more.

Are there better, more powerful editors out there? Sure. But just like vim, you can expect to find nano pretty much anywhere, and if you need to make a quick change, say to a configuration file on a bare-bones system, that's nice.

Re: GNU Nano 4.0

#35

Post by seibelj »

geuszb wrote: post #29

I'm sure nano/pico and the like are nice but to me there's two things a terminal editor can try to solve for: being nice, or bring ubiquitous. The nicest ones (say emacs) are way nicer than nano in terms of features, extensibility, etc. Now for being ubiquitous, nothing beats vi to date. I can't tell what nano is aiming for? EDIT I guess I had assumed that vi/vim was significantly more widespread than nano. Maybe tha…

emacs is a significantly larger installation (disk) than nano, taking longer to install and more system resources consumed. If I'm jumping into a small VPS to tweak something, or auto-installing an editor in every docker container, nano wins over emacs.

As a developer who almost exclusively uses GUI editors (Sublime / IntelliJ) I have lost the emacs skills I gained in college, and I don't use emacs enough to remember the key strokes necessary to make it more useful than nano. It's more difficult than nano because I have to google a cheat-sheet every time I use emacs.

I never liked vim.

Nano is a great terminal editor, has enough commands to make me productive when needed, and I use it exclusively for terminal text editing.

Re: GNU Nano 4.0

#36

Post by chronogram »

tofflos wrote: post #5

It's too bad the Windows Store only contains Ubuntu LTS editions. It'll be July 2020 before all the improvements from 2.9.3 on up become available for most WSL users. :(

I installed Debian from the store, and set it as default with the ‘wslconfig’ command. I changed Debian to unstable for 99% of things, and use the Ubuntu profile for 1% of things. New packages!

Re: GNU Nano 4.0

#37

Post by saagarjha »

blattimwind wrote: post #25
sscarduzio wrote: post #10

It's amazing how, no matter how old or small a piece of software is, as long as it keeps being used, itremains a living thing and keeps on changing and evolving.

For a stable piece of software the build script(s) somehow turn into a change hotspot. You might have not touched the core of the software in five years, but guess what, every couple months some change to the build script is necessary.

Depends on how much nonstandard stuff you’re using, and whether you have flags such as -Werror that can cause “new” build failures.

Re: GNU Nano 4.0

#38

Post by _delirium »

thomascgalvin wrote: post #34
geuszb wrote: post #29

I'm sure nano/pico and the like are nice but to me there's two things a terminal editor can try to solve for: being nice, or bring ubiquitous. The nicest ones (say emacs) are way nicer than nano in terms of features, extensibility, etc. Now for being ubiquitous, nothing beats vi to date. I can't tell what nano is aiming for? EDIT I guess I had assumed that vi/vim was significantly more widespread than nano. Maybe tha…

Legacy, more than anything else. Nano has been a thing for decades, and it will likely be a thing for decades more. Are there better, more powerful editors out there? Sure. But just like vim, you can expect to find nano pretty much anywhere, and if you need to make a quick change, say to a configuration file on a bare-bones system, that's nice.

Of those two (nano/vim), I've also found it easier to introduce people to nano. I personally use vim, but if I'm doing a tutorial for people who aren't very familiar with the unix terminal, and at some point in the tutorial they need to edit a config file, I'd rather not take a big digression into explaining vi's modal-editing concept just to change one line in a config file.

Re: GNU Nano 4.0

#39

Post by pantalaimon »

nicoburns wrote: post #17
mmastrac wrote: post #3

"nano" is an interesting creature - it was originally developed as a replacement for the "pico" command that shipped with "pine" (an amazing curses-based email client) because the license on pico was just not really clear. I still use nano 50% of the time because it's so easy to jump into a file, make some quick changes, and jump out. Plus the mark/cut/paste keystrokes are seared into my memory after years of use.

I would recommend micro. It's simple like nano, but has full mouse support. The only real downside is that it's not installes by default.

Nano also has mouse support, it's just disabled by default.

/etc/nanorc is worth a look, at least on Debian it's well commented

Re: GNU Nano 4.0

#40

Post by BeetleB »

geuszb wrote: post #29

I'm sure nano/pico and the like are nice but to me there's two things a terminal editor can try to solve for: being nice, or bring ubiquitous. The nicest ones (say emacs) are way nicer than nano in terms of features, extensibility, etc. Now for being ubiquitous, nothing beats vi to date. I can't tell what nano is aiming for? EDIT I guess I had assumed that vi/vim was significantly more widespread than nano. Maybe tha…

The majority of the population can load nano and start using it with almost no training. Not so for vi.
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