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Neo-mc – a Midnight Commander fork with scripting and other features

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Re: Neo-mc – a Midnight Commander fork with scripting and other features

#21

Post by adamweld »

Pxtl wrote: post #19

I'm pretty new to heavy console-based Linux adminning - I just have a raspbian pi4 I'm using for a bunch of local services around my house, but I've gotten pretty comfy editing files and tweaking services and chmodding/chowning. However, I refuse to climb the learning cliff of Vi, but nano is... Okay at best? Is mcedit a good option? I'm still just doing everything from shell and nano.

If you're interested in becoming proficient text editing in the shell, I highly recommend just biting the bullet and learning the basics with vim. It's significantly less of a "cliff" than you'd expect. Just spend a few minutes running through the built-in tutorial (vimtutor), learn how to save and open files and move around the document, and set a few defaults in your config.

Only about 30 minutes of effort will be enough to make it much easier to use than nano, in my opinion. Then over time you can learn what makes it powerful, play with mouse control, check out neovim, etc...

Re: Neo-mc – a Midnight Commander fork with scripting and other features

#22

Post by dbtc »

Pxtl wrote: post #19

I'm pretty new to heavy console-based Linux adminning - I just have a raspbian pi4 I'm using for a bunch of local services around my house, but I've gotten pretty comfy editing files and tweaking services and chmodding/chowning. However, I refuse to climb the learning cliff of Vi, but nano is... Okay at best? Is mcedit a good option? I'm still just doing everything from shell and nano.

Maybe try thinking of vi as a programming language (for interacting with text) rather than a text editor. It's really a Human Programming Interface (HPA not API?) which you can run in the line editor of your shell (readline), or in emacs, tmux, even firefox, but of course it works best in vi/vim/nvim.

Learning the vi language makes me think about interacting with computers in a new way.

Re: Neo-mc – a Midnight Commander fork with scripting and other features

#23

Post by indigodaddy »

adamweld wrote: post #21
Pxtl wrote: post #19

I'm pretty new to heavy console-based Linux adminning - I just have a raspbian pi4 I'm using for a bunch of local services around my house, but I've gotten pretty comfy editing files and tweaking services and chmodding/chowning. However, I refuse to climb the learning cliff of Vi, but nano is... Okay at best? Is mcedit a good option? I'm still just doing everything from shell and nano.

If you're interested in becoming proficient text editing in the shell, I highly recommend just biting the bullet and learning the basics with vim. It's significantly less of a "cliff" than you'd expect. Just spend a few minutes running through the built-in tutorial (vimtutor), learn how to save and open files and move around the document, and set a few defaults in your config. Only about 30 minutes of effort will be…

Upvoting/seconding this. It doesn’t take as much effort/pain as you think it will. Don’t believe the FUD. That said, plain old vi on older Solaris systems is still a pain in the ass lol.

Re: Neo-mc – a Midnight Commander fork with scripting and other features

#24

Post by ilaksh »

Pxtl wrote: post #19

I'm pretty new to heavy console-based Linux adminning - I just have a raspbian pi4 I'm using for a bunch of local services around my house, but I've gotten pretty comfy editing files and tweaking services and chmodding/chowning. However, I refuse to climb the learning cliff of Vi, but nano is... Okay at best? Is mcedit a good option? I'm still just doing everything from shell and nano.

I recently discovered 'micro' which is along the lines of nano in a way but more modern and just about perfect for me.

I wish TextAdept had become more popular since I always thought it was a strong choice for a modern editor with solid Lua customization support. But it seems like 'micro' is the popular one. Has 16000 stars on GitHub.

Re: Neo-mc – a Midnight Commander fork with scripting and other features

#25

Post by ilaksh »

Pxtl wrote: post #19

I'm pretty new to heavy console-based Linux adminning - I just have a raspbian pi4 I'm using for a bunch of local services around my house, but I've gotten pretty comfy editing files and tweaking services and chmodding/chowning. However, I refuse to climb the learning cliff of Vi, but nano is... Okay at best? Is mcedit a good option? I'm still just doing everything from shell and nano.

As someone who has wasted like 30 years off and on learning how to edit like it's 1979 in vim, I recommend you do not do get peer-pressured into that. Take a look at micro or TextAdept or use gedit with sshfs or VSCode or.. just something from recent decades.

Re: Neo-mc – a Midnight Commander fork with scripting and other features

#26

Post by weaksauce »

Pxtl wrote: post #19

I'm pretty new to heavy console-based Linux adminning - I just have a raspbian pi4 I'm using for a bunch of local services around my house, but I've gotten pretty comfy editing files and tweaking services and chmodding/chowning. However, I refuse to climb the learning cliff of Vi, but nano is... Okay at best? Is mcedit a good option? I'm still just doing everything from shell and nano.

If you think of vim as a language to edit text it becomes a lot easier to remember how to do something... if you just try to memorize a bunch of incantations it will be awful.

for instance in normal mode where you issue commands to edit text(opposed to insert mode which is akin to any other editor where it's mostly just typing information into the document) you can issue something like delete a(round) word and it deletes the word `daw`. or delete inner word `diw`. want to change a word? change d to c and it deletes the word and leaves you in insert mode to type. all of the commands are very composable and form a "language" to edit text that's a lot more approachable than you'd think. one fun one is something like `ci'` or `ci"` which will if you are on a line with an open and closing " or ' will search forward in the line for a " or ' and delete what's inside that and leave you in insert mode to make your edits....

some more fun reading: https://gist.github.com/nifl/1178878

Re: Neo-mc – a Midnight Commander fork with scripting and other features

#27

Post by weaksauce »

ilaksh wrote: post #25
Pxtl wrote: post #19

I'm pretty new to heavy console-based Linux adminning - I just have a raspbian pi4 I'm using for a bunch of local services around my house, but I've gotten pretty comfy editing files and tweaking services and chmodding/chowning. However, I refuse to climb the learning cliff of Vi, but nano is... Okay at best? Is mcedit a good option? I'm still just doing everything from shell and nano.

As someone who has wasted like 30 years off and on learning how to edit like it's 1979 in vim, I recommend you do not do get peer-pressured into that. Take a look at micro or TextAdept or use gedit with sshfs or VSCode or.. just something from recent decades.

you don't need to eschew model editing if you go to something like vscode... there's a great neovim plugin for vscode that gives you full vim in the background but also has a nicer vscode interface for the frontend.

Re: Neo-mc – a Midnight Commander fork with scripting and other features

#28

Post by indigodaddy »

ilaksh wrote: post #25
Pxtl wrote: post #19

I'm pretty new to heavy console-based Linux adminning - I just have a raspbian pi4 I'm using for a bunch of local services around my house, but I've gotten pretty comfy editing files and tweaking services and chmodding/chowning. However, I refuse to climb the learning cliff of Vi, but nano is... Okay at best? Is mcedit a good option? I'm still just doing everything from shell and nano.

As someone who has wasted like 30 years off and on learning how to edit like it's 1979 in vim, I recommend you do not do get peer-pressured into that. Take a look at micro or TextAdept or use gedit with sshfs or VSCode or.. just something from recent decades.

Sure, but if someone is trying to get into *nix SA, or even cloudy/devopsy/CI stuff, you really do need to learn vi/m.

Re: Neo-mc – a Midnight Commander fork with scripting and other features

#29

Post by ilaksh »

weaksauce wrote: post #27
ilaksh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has wasted like 30 years off and on learning how to edit like it's 1979 in vim, I recommend you do not do get peer-pressured into that. Take a look at micro or TextAdept or use gedit with sshfs or VSCode or.. just something from recent decades.

you don't need to eschew model editing if you go to something like vscode... there's a great neovim plugin for vscode that gives you full vim in the background but also has a nicer vscode interface for the frontend.

I just suspect that people who advocate for modal editing and hjkl etc. think that those things are some grand UX secret that only real nerds know about. But really they are just artifacts of that particular historical circumstance.

http://xahlee.info/kbd/keyboard_hardware_and_key_choices.htm...

"How did vi's mode switching idea came from? Back in 1970s, terminal screen are 80 columns by 24 lines. There's no real-time editing. You edit by typing a command, then call another command to have the screen update to show the result of your command. Vi's “modal editing” is evolved from this. This is also why emacs's manual calls itself “Real Time Display Editor”. Emacs is the first or one of the first “Real Time Display” editor.

Why vi uses j k h l for cursor movement? Unix vi's use of j k h i for cursor movement, and the choice of Escape key for mode switching, came from the keyboard it was developed on, the ADM-3A terminal."

Re: Neo-mc – a Midnight Commander fork with scripting and other features

#30

Post by ilaksh »

indigodaddy wrote: post #28
ilaksh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has wasted like 30 years off and on learning how to edit like it's 1979 in vim, I recommend you do not do get peer-pressured into that. Take a look at micro or TextAdept or use gedit with sshfs or VSCode or.. just something from recent decades.

Sure, but if someone is trying to get into *nix SA, or even cloudy/devopsy/CI stuff, you really do need to learn vi/m.

Why? It's just as easy to install micro as it is vim.

sudo apt install micro

or

curl https://getmic.ro | bash

Or just download the binary from github.

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