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Nano 5.7

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Re: Nano 5.7

#121

Post by Arnavion »

ChrisClark wrote: post #93
fouric wrote: 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, for quick edits I prefer nano. Might just be because I grew up with edit on DOS, and Out of the vi, emacs and nano it was the closest and I just stuck with it. Any programming I do is in Jetbrain IDEs. But I saw a comment here long ago that says it's worth learning vim keybinds, even if you never use vim. Because you can be sure, no matter what IDE or editor you end up using, someone has created a vim keybinds…

Meh, that vim keybinds thing is an exaggeration. Using arrows keys for moving the cursor, holding down Ctrl for jumping words, holding down Shift for selection, etc is even more consistent across editors, and doesn't even need any plugins.

Re: Nano 5.7

#122

Post by ravi-delia »

patrec wrote: post #119
293984j29384 wrote: post #6

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 never understood the hate Nano gets from vi users. The reason I hate nano was that it's been forced upon me for in my view entirely misguided attempt to make the commandline more approachable. So that now instead of any competent unix person needing to have at least minimal skills with two arcane (but powerful) editors (vi - for editing, and emacs for shell keybindings at least), you now also need minimal skills…

Who is forcing nano on you? Why do they get to tell you what text editor to use? Blink twice if someone is holding you hostage at your computer, no one deserves a life of nano use.

Re: Nano 5.7

#123

Post by potta_coffee »

Avery3R wrote: post #107
Ekaros wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I wouldn't call vs code an IDE, it's closer to a text editor

VSCode has intellisense, debugger, console, etc. It definitely fills a niche between a text editor and an IDE, IMO.

Re: Nano 5.7

#124

Post by jolmg »

chungy wrote: post #90
jolmg wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have a bunch of comments and empty lines, even with spaces, and git will still abort if you don't have anything else in the commit message. An EOL/newline character shouldn't cause the commit to continue.

There are overrides to make empty messages or including otherwise-comments, but yeah... you have to do such things rather explicitly. No way you can do it by accident.

But none accept a single newline as a message while at the same time rejecting truly empty messages.

Re: Nano 5.7

#125

Post by sixstringtheory »

marcodiego wrote: post #58
fouric wrote: 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…

More than that, Benno Schulenberg, nano's main developer, is actively against changes turn nano into anything close to a mini-IDE. He rejected patches that could nano have code completion from external tools, multi-pane/screens, source code navigation and many others. I respect his lead, but that discourages contribution. Disclaimer: I'm a very sporadic nano contributor.

> that discourages contribution

I wouldn’t say it does so across the board. Rather, it filters contributions to only encourage those of the kind they desire.

There’s also the question of whether they even want “more contribution”. The less features, the less maintenance burden… Less maintenance burden, easier for fewer people to accomplish the work… Fewer people means less coordinating effort.

Simplicity seems to lead to a virtuous cycle here.

Re: Nano 5.7

#126

Post by cicero »

bear8642 wrote: post #70
blueblob wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I used to use ed when all I had was a single terminal screen/window and a compiler error message. Ed doesn't clear the screen, so you can still see the message. Vi or emacs would clear the error message away. Of course, in a multi-window situation, the compiler output is usually in one window or pane and the editor in another, so this is moot now.

Re: Nano 5.7

#127

Post by cicero »

garyrob wrote: post #91
fouric wrote: 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…

Personally I use jstar (a configuration of Joe) because in the 80's I used WordStar and I like using the same key combos. :) But that's for small editing tasks. For coding I use VSCode or a JetBrains product.

Upvote for mentioning WordStar. I only used it some in the Texas A&M computer lab. I went from my dad's Apple II, to a Commodore 64 I bought in college, to a Macintosh after I graduated. None of them were WordStar platforms, but I remember it was very popular in the CP/M and MS-DOS world before WordPerfect took over.

Re: Nano 5.7

#128

Post by garyrob »

cicero wrote: post #127
garyrob wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I use jstar (a configuration of Joe) because in the 80's I used WordStar and I like using the same key combos. :) But that's for small editing tasks. For coding I use VSCode or a JetBrains product.

Upvote for mentioning WordStar. I only used it some in the Texas A&M computer lab. I went from my dad's Apple II, to a Commodore 64 I bought in college, to a Macintosh after I graduated. None of them were WordStar platforms, but I remember it was very popular in the CP/M and MS-DOS world before WordPerfect took over.

Yeah, my programming OS was CP/M

Re: Nano 5.7

#129

Post by ChrisClark »

Arnavion wrote: post #121
ChrisClark wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, for quick edits I prefer nano. Might just be because I grew up with edit on DOS, and Out of the vi, emacs and nano it was the closest and I just stuck with it. Any programming I do is in Jetbrain IDEs. But I saw a comment here long ago that says it's worth learning vim keybinds, even if you never use vim. Because you can be sure, no matter what IDE or editor you end up using, someone has created a vim keybinds…

Meh, that vim keybinds thing is an exaggeration. Using arrows keys for moving the cursor, holding down Ctrl for jumping words, holding down Shift for selection, etc is even more consistent across editors, and doesn't even need any plugins.

I was more thinking of the benefits of vim-style, the advanced controls for moving and jumping around according to code structure. Not just jumping a word at a time, but jumping to a character, deleting a word, sentence, block, etc.

Those are not always standardized across editors.

Re: Nano 5.7

#130

Post by 1MachineElf »

ravi-delia wrote: post #122
patrec wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I never understood the hate Nano gets from vi users. The reason I hate nano was that it's been forced upon me for in my view entirely misguided attempt to make the commandline more approachable. So that now instead of any competent unix person needing to have at least minimal skills with two arcane (but powerful) editors (vi - for editing, and emacs for shell keybindings at least), you now also need minimal skills…

Who is forcing nano on you? Why do they get to tell you what text editor to use? Blink twice if someone is holding you hostage at your computer, no one deserves a life of nano use.

Both the GuixSD and NixOS default system packages have nano and not vi. If you realize that you want vi, then you have to get it networked and change the configuration, all using nano, in order to install it.
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