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GNU nano is my editor of choice

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Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice

#41

Post by brundolf »

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.

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

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice

#42

Post by dllthomas »

hkt wrote: post #31
relax88 wrote: post #25

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.

Is installing an editor really such a hardship?

Usually not, sometimes very much so.

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice

#44

Post by theonemind »

Outside of corner cases, most of the things that become the focus of tech religious wars make fairly marginal difference compared to other factors, like proper design, testing, documentation, etc. (Corner cases do exist, however; no one wants to write a compiler in brainfuck). I definitely tend toward a view of do the work, boring stuff included, in whatever text editor, IDE, and language floats your boat.

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice

#45

Post by dijit »

emef wrote: post #32
relax88 wrote: post #25

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.

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

Doesn’t POSIX designate vi as a requirement?

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6880751

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice

#46

Post by yakubin »

hkt wrote: post #31
relax88 wrote: post #25

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.

Is installing an editor really such a hardship?

In "linux embedded", absolutely. You take what's there. At some point I even had a debugging session through TeamViewer connected to a Windows machine which had Terraterm open connected to serial port of a linux box. Unfortunately, there was a lot of spam on the serial port, so even using vi was impossible, because the screen got garbled pretty fast. So I printed the files with cat, worked out a set of sed commands to get those files to the desired state and typed them back in. Crazy. But real.

(Add to that communicating with a guy on-site over notepad.exe. Mr. Robot vibes.)

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice

#47

Post by bspammer »

_def wrote: post #10

nano was my cli editor of choice because I was overwhelmed by vim. For years I felt subpar and thought that I should learn using vim. I'm using vim for some years now but I don't really make much use of it's features, maybe an occasional cut and paste, which probably can easily be done with nano too.

An easy (and fun) way to get better at vim and learn some of its features is to play vimgolf [1]. After you submit you can see solutions which are slightly better than yours, and run them through to see what each command does.

[1] http://www.vimgolf.com

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice

#48

Post by garciasn »

jrockway wrote: post #28

> 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…

I wish vim had the option for CTRL-K/U behavior rather than having to do the unintuitive (to me) visual block.

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice

#49

Post by yakubin »

dijit wrote: post #45
emef wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Doesn’t POSIX designate vi as a requirement? https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6880751

POSIX doesn't say anything about containers.

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice

#50

Post by dijit »

yakubin wrote: post #49
dijit wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t POSIX designate vi as a requirement? https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6880751

POSIX doesn't say anything about containers.

But your containers may be a bit weird if their environment isn’t POSIX.

Like if you removed the “cd” command or the ability to read environment variables. “Containers” is any definition you want, but surely they’re built to some standard.

PS: I do make “from scratch” images a lot, I know you don’t “need” to have any utilities at all, but I’m fairly certain that a lot of software expects the “OS” to be POSIX.

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