121–130 of 236 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Its not snobbery if it is better
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…
You know, after a number of years in the industry, I've largely stopped caring about what others think and wouldn't lose my sleep over it - the best tools are the ones that you're familiar with and that solve your problems.
For me, that's using nano, for someone else that could be vim. I might want to use some of the JetBrains IDEs, use something like Java liberally because of its verbosity and not even scoff at older software like Lazarus/FreePascal in some circumstances (their approach to GUI is still superior to most modern ones). For someone else that could be Visual Studio Code, a language like Python, or generally looking in the direction of the bleeding edge of languages, such as Rust.
As long as you reach your goals, i think it's perfectly reasonable to dismiss peer pressure or criticism, unless it's constructive (like the person who suggested that vim is better for replace operations over slow connections, which was a good point but also something I've never needed).
That said, the author's approach to customizing nano made me appreciate how nice having proper configuration files and options within them is!
> The vim vs emacs flame war I doubt that there is any ongoing vim vs. emacs flamewar. Most people are probably arguing about VSCode vs. JetBrains these days. My impression as an Emacs user is that if someone says they use Vim, I think "hey, one of us". (nano I guess falls into that category, but I bet nano users are missing out on some timesaving innovations from the last few years, and nothing frustrates me more th…
But dammit, Emacs brings many Lisp Machine advantages to your editor, including live-coding your editor's configuration. If there's a task you need done, or a change you need to make to how the editor works, you can code it up in Emacs Lisp right in the running editor (or even record a macro as a starting point), test it, debug it, and save it off if you like the results. Without leaving your editing session.
The huge advantages this brings outweighs my complaints with Emacs Lisp the language (which are many).
I was like "WTF?" because I'm a Mac programmer and my plain text editor is BBEdit or an IDE. If I have to edit a file in Terminal I'll use nano.
The session leader thought I was weird, but I quit vi (eventually), used nano and it worked fine. I still don't know how to use vi or Emacs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I've never worked with distros targeting enterprise, but I've never encountered a distro that didn't include nano. Even if Vim is "better", I think it's important for all distros to include a text editor that is easy to use out of the box, and nano fits that bill perfectly.
That said, i immensely enjoy how small the install size for nano is and how there's no actual work that you need to do to get started with it (unless you need/want customization, like the author of the original article).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Every Unix machine (Mac or Linux) that I've ever tried to use nano on has had it preinstalled. I'm sure not all of them have it preinstalled, but it's common at least in mainstream distros
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.
(I mostly use a mix of sublime, intellij, and vscode to edit text)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you’ve never logged into a Linux machine without nano installed, then you probably haven’t logged into that many flavours of Linux machine. I agree this is pretty much a non issue for the average developer, but those of us who work on network infrastructure, as red-team hackers, or do any work on embedded systems can attest to how much of a pain it would be to not know how to use vi/vim.
This is even more common in the world of containers where “nice to have just for debugging” get omitted. You haven’t lived till you have to edit using only sed.
But not having a basic text editor that is probably a few hundred KB feels a bit silly, especially given how many environment dependencies usually get packaged into containers anyways.
That's like not including any sort of a shell in your container and wondering why people are having troubles with debugging.
Personally, i think that just basing container images on something like Alpine, Debian or even Ubuntu images is good enough because those are stripped down enough already for the most part.