In the olden times, we had IRCA channels for hackers who dedicated their time and energy to certain kinds of software. You would certainly expect to find this person on IRC in a semi-official nano channel. How is it these days? How do you find these awesome experts?
GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)
111–120 of 303 posts
Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)
#112All of the old editors are horrible. Nano, vi, emacs... sure they might be conveniently placed, but are a pain to learn. This one is a vast improvement https://micro-editor.github.io/
Wha?! Nothing matches the power of vi or emacs. Nothing. If you don't want the power, or don't need the tool, fine. I get that. But calling vi terrible, is like complaining that a sledgehammer is terrible, because you want to hang a picture, and that's all you have.
Vi is not a sledgehammer, it’s more like laser cutter from dead space. It can both cut huge monsters and make laser cuts on your organs.
Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)
#113I wonder if this blog post got written because some discussion about Fedora switching the OS default for terminal text editors to GNU nano spilled over somewhere.
Fedora Linux 33 Change: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/UseNanoByDefault
Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)
#114For people picking up linux for the first time that initial impression is crucial. Dropping people like that into an editor that requires you to somehow know ":q!" is the answer is utterly insane. Same with beginner tutorials using vi. It's straight up bad for linux adoption even if technically superior. Anyone that is a vi fan likely has the skillset to install it themselves - the reverse is not always true.
> It's straight up bad for linux adoption even if technically superior. I think the idea that Vim is "technically superior" should be challenged as well. I've watched, and participated in, dozens of discussions on text editors, and have never been shown a concrete piece of scientific evidence demonstrating Vim's claimed superiority according to any real-world metric. All we have are artificial comparisons where it ta…
Well there's no convincing you then.
The pros of modal editing is well documented, and I'm not even arguing about the superiority of vim over the likes of emacs.
People who believe using cursor to select, move, copy stuff are better than modal editing, even after all the argument, is probably not going to be swayed ever. As an almost pure vim user, I know how my own speed are significantly improved ever since I adopted vim and its modals, and I don't need to mentally construct keystrokes just like most people don't need to look at a keyboard to type.
The demonstration are mostly some edge cases that don't really happen, but the general speed over general editing, some `V}y` here, some `ci(` there, some `Vjj2>`, `c-vwwGx` etc is what makes vim really shine. And no we don't have to dig a dictionary to type those things, all I had to do was to open vim since that's how muscle memory works.
Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can you even use cat to write? I understand dd or echo, but cat by itself? Cat /dev/whatever and a steady hand?
$ cat test > this is a test text file > written with cat > EOF $ cat > test > this is an extra line at the end > EOF $ cat test this is a test text file written with cat this is an extra line at the end But not sure how you modify them. An option will be using other tools but that makes cat incapable of being a text editor .
> An option will be using other tools but that makes cat incapable of being a text editor.
It’s only a problem if you make mistakes. Real programmers don’t, hence cat is perfectly cromulent.
Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you look at how other (console) programs on the system work, Vi(m) is more consistent than Nano. ed, sed, awk, readline, even perl... knowing one of them, you know how to use vi. Likewise, know vi, you know how to use most of these tools (sans visual/modal editing abstraction). Also, it follows the Unix spirit of making small programs (in Vi(m) it can be seen as "a small number of key presses") and composing them…
>you'd have to jump to the beginning or the end of the line first, then hit Ctrl-k. This is not correct, ctrl+k works anywhere on the line?
It deletes to end of line.
Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)
#117[dead]
Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, having system wide keyboard shortcuts will almost certainly impose unwanted constraints on how an app can behave.
Exactly, that's the whole damn point. It's to constrain those app devs from making stupid UI choices.
I use vim keys everywhere I can, so from my standpoint “stupid” UI choices are the ones that don’t support modality. I would really prefer having vim keys optional built ins everywhere. Your situation is simpler though - you can just avoid using vim or whatever, there’s plenty of other options available.
Also calling personal preferences of lots of people “stupid” is far from reasonable. I’ve met a lot of smart folks who used vim and emacs, so from my personal experience it’s not correct.
Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)
#119Using those kind of Unix tools is like having a time travel machine to understand what kind of mistakes you should never do when Iyou design a software. Not having system wide keyboard shortcuts is one of them: vim, emacs, nano etc all have a different shortcut to quit the app Worse still, every software invents his own configuration format. Thinking that being ultra configurable is a good excuse for not doing the ri…
Right. So everyone should use system-wide keyboard shortcuts. Preferably your favourites, right? At least they should work well for your favourite window manager, I suppose? Because those who like different shortcuts and different window managers are weird and don't understand UX. /s My preference is to start with a minimalistic system that works on most platforms, and where I can install what I want. If I wanted a s…
> Preferably your favourites, right?
System-wide does not imply unconfigurable, it just means that all programs derive some of their behavior from an external source.
If I want Ctrl+P to paste text across every single application that accepts text and I only have to configure it once in one place, I see that as a win.
Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
alt+f4, ctrl+s, ctrl+x/c/v, ctrl+z, ctrl+p all work near universally on windows. Up until Windows XP that was also true for F1, but shipping help files somehow got out of fashion. Of course there are exceptions, like conhost, but generally you don't have to think about how to save or quit something on windows
except when you have a different locale and language, and half your office suite have the original shortcuts, and the other half is translated like: ctrl + a (abrir, open in Portuguese) instead of select all, that is moved to ctrl + t (tudo, all in Portuguese), and many others. So, universally for English/US I guess.
My pet peeve is ctrl+g to put some text in bold in French Office. It annoys me to no end. But then, things like ctrl-o still work as it should. Even ctrl-a, now that I think of it, and I can’t see where the a would come from.