Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)

ariadne.space

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 303 posts

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)

#231

Post by wankle »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #136
elsjaako wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an enthousiastic vim user. I think everyone who spends a lot if time editing text and who doesn't use vim (or similar) is probably missing out (including the author of this article). I think vim is really good. But I 100% agree that vim is a stupid default. In almost every context it's going to confuse more people than it makes happy.

Which vim? I prefer neovim personally, but it is not my default editor. I want JetBrains to get off their butts and implement first-party support for Neovim. They would be able to fully ditch their awful vim emulator, and I'm honestly astounded they still have not done a neovim first party plugin yet, or anyone for that matter (last I looked anyway). It would solidify vim for me permanently, being able to pop it into…

I've tried to like neovim but plain vi works best for me. I've tried to like nano too.

Since you brought up JetBrains, I use no products made by them, at all, any more. I use Eclipse and I don't use a vi plugin in Eclipse.

My habit is if in bash, use vi, if in an IDE (or otherwise at my Ubuntu or Windows (work...I know) desktop), use a regular type of editor.

If I were young and never worked on old Korn shell systems or other old UNIX systems I'd probably not have learned vi and would be a nano user in the shell today.

Summary, in my brain, shell == vi, IDE\|desktop == regular editor

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)

#232

Post by alkonaut »

3836293648 wrote: post #206
alkonaut wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it depends on how you use the system. I have no intention of ever using a Linux as my “main” system. I’m always a visitor on a strange foreign system. I hold my nose, go in, do whatever dirty deed must be done to get it working again. Usually it’s in some docker image, or an old pi used in my closet, maybe a router, or a cloud vm. But regardless it’s never “home”. I don’t have a personal user, I don’t have a…

Git for windows makes a huge deal in its installer about how the default is unchanged for compatibility and how you should pick nano or vsc instead

It should really at least give notepad as an option and strongly suggest that over vi unless you are looking for compat (compat with what?).

Tbh I don’t know why you’d want a bash for it to begin with. The only thing I miss in other shells (cmd/PS) is that you can’t make shell aliases in git.

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)

#233

Post by wankle »

_0w8t wrote: post #177
p-e-w wrote: post #39

There is a very simple, end-of-discussion type argument why shipping Vim as the default editor is a terrible idea: Because its user interface differs significantly from how every other program on the system works. You can have all kinds of fruitful or fruitless debates about whether there is some deeper sense in which Vim is a "superior" editor, but there is no sensible reason for it to be the default, ever. Conventi…

Nano default key bindings are not standard either. They are less different than vi from a typical GUI input controls and having a menu at the bottom of the screen help, but they force the user to get used to yet another convention. I was considering at some point to create a patch to nano to have a simple option to switch to more common bindings or even ask the user on the first run about it. But then I discovered th…

I think that's why I've never shifted from vi to nano, it appears to be a regular editor but ignores all common key bindings, ctrls+s doesn't save, ctrl+f doesn't find, ctrl+h doesn't replace, etc.

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)

#234

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

p-e-w wrote: post #128
dig1 wrote: post #93

Earlier 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…

The so-called "Unix spirit" is itself a rather hilarious mistake from the early days of software engineering, when programmers knew essentially nothing about human/computer interaction and foolishly believed that "efficiency" in a mathematical sense translates to efficient workflows. It took many decades of trial and error to overcome this dogma, but today's productivity software all features a massive amount of func…

Unix efficiency is all about saving time and paper on a teletype. It just happens to have side benefits on modern computers.

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)

#235

Post by throw10920 »

palata wrote: post #163
bombcar wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can override things like paste system-wide or you can customize it for a particular app.

Right. So that's moving the control of the binding from the app to the system settings. The problem is that it makes it harder for the app to have sane defaults. Even for the obvious example of the text editor, where "everybody wants Ctrl+P to paste", where I precisely don't want that in vim and emacs. That's what I meant by "preference": it is your preference to have apps honor your system-wide settings, but it is m…

> The problem is that it makes it harder for the app to have sane defaults.

How is this not trivially solved by having the app ship with its own set of bindings, then provide a simple toggle switch between "use app defaults" and "use OS defaults/user preferences" that is displayed on first use?

> That's what I meant by "preference": it is your preference to have apps honor your system-wide settings, but it is my preference to let the app developers choose their bindings themselves

The above system seems to fairly easily fit your preference - you can trivially choose to use the app bindings, and GP can trivially choose to use the system bindings.

You're advocating for needlessly restricting user choice by using a design that doesn't allow them to pick between a unified set of system shortcuts (which I, and many other millions of people want) and each app doing it their own way (which is a UX disaster for new users).

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)

#236

Post by sbuk »

petre wrote: post #65
nivertech wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nano is usually installed by default

Vi is fortunately present on just about every unix-like system and in busybox. Typing "v" in the pager and getting thrown into nano always prompts me to installing vim and changing the default editor. When I got into Linux there was no nano, only vi and ed. Pico came later with the Pine e-mail client.

> "Pico came later with the Pine e-mail client"

Nope. GNU Nano, like a lot of the early GNU utilities, emulates Pico. I was using Pico/Pine around 1994/95 on UNIX workstations, and Pico was the default editor.

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)

#237

Post by throw10920 »

palata wrote: post #217
smarkov wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because there are some extremely different ways of editing text out there. Key word here being _different_. Different should not be the default. That does not mean we should all be forced to edit text the same way, it just means that the most widely used way of editing text should be the default. For the most part we have agreed on what the standard way of editing text is in GUI's. nano has its quirks but at least…

> it just means that the most widely used way of editing text should be the default. Yeah, maybe. Not entirely convinced though :-). There is a tendency to reinforce the most widely used ways everywhere. As an artist, you can choose to make the kind of music most people want to hear in a night club, or make the kind of music you, as a musician, like. And accept that maybe that's not for the majority. The majority is…

> Yeah, maybe. Not entirely convinced though :-)

You didn't actually provide an argument against having a sane set of defaults with the option to configure them later.

> As an artist, you can choose to make the kind of music most people want to hear in a night club, or make the kind of music you, as a musician, like. And accept that maybe that's not for the majority.

"For art" is a non-answer when it comes to UX - being "artsy" is almost always terrible UX, including in this particular manner of keyboard shortcuts - very, very few people want "artsy" shortcuts, almost everyone wants familiar defaults, and some people want to then configure the bindings after they've gotten used to the tool a bit.

Art is, by definition, about creativity and originality, which is almost the polar opposite of good UX, which is standardization and conformity.

Making a video game with some esoteric control scheme? Fine, go crazy with your input design, people may love it - that is an artistic matter, less so a UX matter. Making an actual tool that people need to use to get work done? That's a UX problem, and your job is to design the tool to be as painless to use as possible, not to be creative, because your creative desire will, unless controlled very carefully, directly lead to pain and frustration of your users.

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)

#238

Post by jalgos_eminator »

pwpw wrote: post #186

Does anyone have a good tutorial for vim/neovim that they recommended for learning how to use them effectively? I’ve been using vim for over a year for quick edits, but I don’t think I get the most out of it.

vimtutor. It comes with the full vim install, at least in ubuntu. It will give you the basics, then afterward you can run :h to see what the less used commands do.

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)

#239

Post by ripe »

pavlov wrote: post #15

I’m forever stuck with 1980s Turbo Pascal as my heart’s secret place of text-mode editing comfort, and nano is probably the closest thing available by default in most Unixes.

Yes!! Thanks for reminding me.

Turbo Pascal was the ultimate in text editing. In fact, it was a complete IDE in a TUI. And the most-used commands were single keystrokes. Edit-run cycles were so fast that I was writing programs to do regular automation tasks.

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice (2021)

#240

Post by jalgos_eminator »

> modal editing doesn’t really fit my mental model of how an editor should work

The whole point of vim is that you change your mental model to become faster at editing text. People don't come into programming with a blank slate about editors, they were introduced to wysiwyg editors from an early age because of Microsoft Word, web based text input, and now phones (with emojis too). A mental model had been impressed already, but that doesn't make it the "default" or the best.

I used notpad++ in college, then switched to vim after I saw my boss edit some code while I was looking over his shoulder. He could do complex editing tasks with just a couple keystrokes and doing them so fast that I couldn't keep up just watching. It seemed like he was editing at the same speed as he was thinking which didn't seem possible to me at the time.

Post reply on HN