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Nano 5.7

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61–70 of 157 posts

Re: Nano 5.7

#61
post #31

As a vim and emacs user, I don't give nano any hate. I'm surprised when programmers use it, sure, but that's because if my profession was going to require editing text files for hours a day (which it does), I would be happy to trade a steeper learning curve now for a less unpleasant job experience later. I totally understand why non-programmers don't use it. If your job does not involve you editing text files for hou…

I personally prefer nano over vi, ed or emacs. But when I do some programming or bigger work I use proper IDE like Visual Studio Code or Eclipse.

It's decent enough for times when you want to do something quick on cli. And then spend rest of the time with graphical IDEs...

Re: Nano 5.7

#62
post #48

I never understood the hate Nano gets from vi users. Nano does many things quicker and easier than vi. For example, search & replace. Would I code in Nano? No. Do I use Nano to edit configuration files and make other small edits? Absolutely.

I'm intrigued. How do you search and replace in nano and how can it be better than `:%s/ / /gc`? I thought search and replacement was one of the killer features of vim.

I can't remember how but nano has the bottom two lines showing common actions and their key-commands, so the answer is on screen.

Re: Nano 5.7

#63

A delightfully opaque version name, as ever. Does anyone know what it's referencing?

It's a clone / inspired by the editor in Pine, pico, the PIne COmposer. Ages ago, Pine was fairly standard for text-based email on Unix.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_(email_client)

The name is a play on metric prefixes.

Re: Nano 5.7

#64

1 critical comment about nano, 3 top level comments defending nano from the evil vim users. (at time of reading)

0 discussion of any new features in Nano-5.7 (the topic of the post)

Re: Nano 5.7

#65

CMD-F "micro" returned nothing, so here is a link to a modern nano replacement: https://micro-editor.github.io

I'm curious what the intended audience for micro is? It seems like if you want extensibility you use vi or emacs. If you want a very quick and dirty program where you use the same 4 or 5 commands every time you open it, you use nano since it's already installed. I don't know a lot of people in the middle, personally, so I'm curious what people who are using micro like about it in particular.

micro has two really nice features

- mouse select

- same keyboard shortcuts as vscode

other than that it's the same as nano

Re: Nano 5.7

#66

Learning from this HN thread that apparently Nano gets hate. I've been programming for years, nano is still my go-to for "I'm in the terminal and I need to make a small modification". I use it daily.

Same here. I think it's better for small modifications. I find CTRL+o CTRL+x faster than ESC + :x, also there is no need to enter an edit mode. But at the end of the day is a matter of taste.

Re: Nano 5.7

#67

I don't understand the people who dislike nano as an editor for the *nix system. After spending in it for like 30 minutes - it becomes an indispensable tool for quickly touching up text files anywhere you go to! No matter where I SSH to (*nix systems) - I always had nano available.

Emacs has had TRAMP[1] (transparently allows you to edit remote files in your local editor using an SSH client) for literally decades now, while SSHFS has been around for nearly as long, and even zeitgeist tools like Visual Studio Code have equivalent TRAMP-like/auto-SSH addons.

The "it's not available on remote machines" line of reasoning hasn't been valid for at least 20 years (age of TRAMP), except for the case where you cannot SSH and have to physically sit at different consoles.

[1] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode

Re: Nano 5.7

#68
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably the elitist guys, the ones that have their identity defined by the editor they use, the language and framework and the Linux distro/DE/OS they use. Many people just need a tool that does a simple job but does it well, like editing a ini file and adding a line or a word, nano is great for that. (we all know that type of guy that has to tell everyone all the time that he uses Arch and Rust would have fixed eve…

> like editing a ini file and adding a line or a word, That's precisely the use case that has made me remove nano from every machine I administer since the 90s. Unless you're really careful to always start nano as "nano -w", its hard word wrapping will introduce line breaks where many configuration file formats (including ini files) don't expect, and it will do so in lines other than the one you're modifying. It's le…

you could've also just set-up an /etc/nanorc file with the appropriate flag set.

Also I've literally never encountered this behaviour even when copy-pasting code between two machines in my humble 10 years of using nano.

Re: Nano 5.7

#69
post #31

As a vim and emacs user, I don't give nano any hate. I'm surprised when programmers use it, sure, but that's because if my profession was going to require editing text files for hours a day (which it does), I would be happy to trade a steeper learning curve now for a less unpleasant job experience later. I totally understand why non-programmers don't use it. If your job does not involve you editing text files for hou…

One thing I've found nano useful for: git commit messages.

If the commit file is empty, that cancels the commit. Nano will tell me how many lines it actually wrote, so if I have second thoughts I can cancel with certainty. Nano may well not be unique in that regard, but I tripped over another editor that saved what I thought was an empty file as a single line with just the EOL character.

Re: Nano 5.7

#70
post #31

As a vim and emacs user, I don't give nano any hate. I'm surprised when programmers use it, sure, but that's because if my profession was going to require editing text files for hours a day (which it does), I would be happy to trade a steeper learning curve now for a less unpleasant job experience later. I totally understand why non-programmers don't use it. If your job does not involve you editing text files for hou…

Yeah, how could you hate on anyone who uses the standard text editor?[0] [0] https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

you joke, but ed is great if have tiny change to make given compiler output simply just to how fast it loads
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