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GNU nano is my editor of choice

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Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice

#31

Post by hkt »

relax88 wrote: post #25
ctur wrote: post #6

The thesis of this post is roughly that nano, when configured, is enough of an editor for the author. Which is totally fine! People should be happy with their tools and not feel pressured by popularity to use what others use (vim, emacs being prime competitors in this case). Alas, nano (and pico before it) have a certain stigma among more "experienced" Unix users that more or less boils down to gatekeeping and snobbe…

It’s not really gatekeeping or snobbery to say that knowing vim is more useful simply because I can log into any Linux machine on the planet and edit a text file without having to install an editor.

Is installing an editor really such a hardship?

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice

#32

Post by emef »

relax88 wrote: post #25
ctur wrote: post #6

The thesis of this post is roughly that nano, when configured, is enough of an editor for the author. Which is totally fine! People should be happy with their tools and not feel pressured by popularity to use what others use (vim, emacs being prime competitors in this case). Alas, nano (and pico before it) have a certain stigma among more "experienced" Unix users that more or less boils down to gatekeeping and snobbe…

It’s not really gatekeeping or snobbery to say that knowing vim is more useful simply because I can log into any Linux machine on the planet and edit a text file without having to install an editor.

this is less true these days w/ slim docker images that don't include any editors by default

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice

#33

Post by crispyalmond »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #19
Guid_NewGuid wrote: post #14

So I have a question and I'd like to understand if possible. To me programming isn't text editing. Granted, we use text to write most code outside of say Pike but effectively most programming is working with symbols right? Like .subst is meaningless as an operation on a string but .substring(0, 1) is meaningful. So I don't really get the advantage of such, to my mind, rudimentary text editors. At a minimum surely bei…

The advantage is you don't become dependent on an IDE. Ever seen someone who can't write anything without all the IDE aids to fill in code for them?

I fully agree to an extent. Some APIs (e.g. Android) are huge and a pain to type in Java without some sort of completion. Maybe I'm just lazy or used to C, but Java makes having an IDE almost essential.

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice

#34

Post by aroman »

relax88 wrote: post #25
ctur wrote: post #6

The thesis of this post is roughly that nano, when configured, is enough of an editor for the author. Which is totally fine! People should be happy with their tools and not feel pressured by popularity to use what others use (vim, emacs being prime competitors in this case). Alas, nano (and pico before it) have a certain stigma among more "experienced" Unix users that more or less boils down to gatekeeping and snobbe…

It’s not really gatekeeping or snobbery to say that knowing vim is more useful simply because I can log into any Linux machine on the planet and edit a text file without having to install an editor.

They probably meant snobbery that vim is superior because it's more capable, not because it's more ubiquitous. Nano is also very widely installed, so the latter point isn't even particularly true.

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice

#36

Post by mad_ned »

i spent a good long time writing code in emacs but our current project uses an IDE, and I found I could be pretty productive in it and learned to leverage its advantages. But I could not live without a solid text editor, and still use emacs for texty stuff, like config and log files and such (even though in theory i could do that in the IDE as well)

But as a result, a lot of the cool stuff I had set up in emacs never gets used anymore. not even sure how to run many of the .el's anymore i have in my .emacs tbh. I could probably get by just fine with nano but run full emacs just out of habit.

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice

#37

Post by dijit »

ctur wrote: post #6

The thesis of this post is roughly that nano, when configured, is enough of an editor for the author. Which is totally fine! People should be happy with their tools and not feel pressured by popularity to use what others use (vim, emacs being prime competitors in this case). Alas, nano (and pico before it) have a certain stigma among more "experienced" Unix users that more or less boils down to gatekeeping and snobbe…

The thing about that “snobbery and gate keeping” is that it’s not at all that.

Maybe not everyone’s experience mimics mine but I felt like people looked down at me a bit when I was 16 for using nano on the command line.

But, and here’s the kicker, if I hadnt been pushed into vim I would not be nearly as productive now.

There have been countless times in my career as a sysadmin/devops/SRE where I’ve been stuck with horrible latency to machines half a world away (or, a few miles away but the network is crappy) and being able to send just a few keystrokes and get a lot of power out of it is helpful.

That’s not counting all the “repeat” patterns or complex search and replace.

I remember still when I got my first job as a junior sysadmin, I spent a really long time logging in to each machine, updating a config file, logging out then going to the next one.

I didn’t need to be told that “ssh and nano is fine”, I needed to be told “there are better tools that you should invest in learning, because they will repay you back thousandfold”.

What I thought were people looking down on me were in fact people looking at me with hopeless pity, because I fought the idea of learning vim.

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice

#38

Post by arghwhat »

Guid_NewGuid wrote: post #14

So I have a question and I'd like to understand if possible. To me programming isn't text editing. Granted, we use text to write most code outside of say Pike but effectively most programming is working with symbols right? Like .subst is meaningless as an operation on a string but .substring(0, 1) is meaningful. So I don't really get the advantage of such, to my mind, rudimentary text editors. At a minimum surely bei…

To me, programming is a mental task that requires overview and easy text manipulation.

Most IDEs get in the way of me effectively navigating the code as it was originally organized, while still maintaing my overview. "Big" IDEs that clearly sacrifice text area for widgets, or shift text around to pop up distracting inline "help" are the worst offenders. I'm looking at you, Visual Studio.

Common IDE tools like ho-to-definition usually leads to poor understanding of the code structure (and in turn doesn't train for good structures). My best anology being navigating by gut vs. being told where to go by an app - you never learn the route and scenery if you're always busy following the route instructions. And if you never start navigating by gut, you never learn to find your way in general.

I always get frustrated by how slow go-to-definition users are compared to those that just... Open the file in the tree that would logically contain that part.

This is just one example of course - another is that IDE are usually not very versatile when writing in many languages. Also, a good text editor can have IDE-like features in a non-intrusive way, but the difference between "IDE" and "enhanced text editor" would to me be the intrusiveness.

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice

#39

Post by Barrin92 »

Guid_NewGuid wrote: post #14

So I have a question and I'd like to understand if possible. To me programming isn't text editing. Granted, we use text to write most code outside of say Pike but effectively most programming is working with symbols right? Like .subst is meaningless as an operation on a string but .substring(0, 1) is meaningful. So I don't really get the advantage of such, to my mind, rudimentary text editors. At a minimum surely bei…

for me personally I noticed that using an IDE started to replace my memory in a way and I didn't like it. I noticed that when I program in languages with an IDE environment (Java in my case) I only really slowly picked up what functions were available in a libraries and I started to really dislike this reliance on constantly looking up things.

When I just program without autocomplete or for that matter constantly googling I actually paid way more attention to 'where things are'.

In python I pretty much know what every string method is. In some languages I used IDEs for I was still scrolling through the completions because I somehow never picked anything up.

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice

#40

Post by dheera »

ctur wrote: post #6

The thesis of this post is roughly that nano, when configured, is enough of an editor for the author. Which is totally fine! People should be happy with their tools and not feel pressured by popularity to use what others use (vim, emacs being prime competitors in this case). Alas, nano (and pico before it) have a certain stigma among more "experienced" Unix users that more or less boils down to gatekeeping and snobbe…

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