61–70 of 303 posts
For 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.
There was a time (2006?) when I was getting into linux. I was a big microsofty, due to comfort mostly, and I was shamed into trying Linux. Like most people I went Ubuntu first, but wifi drivers at the time were lacking, and nvidia of yore was certainly not better than nvidia of now. Suffice it to say: I spent a lot of time in the terminal trying to fix things. Nano was my tool of choice because: honestly the initial…
You could regexp replace all '^[a-z]{4}' (or whatever) with ''. Alternatively you could select area and execute '|sed ' or '|cut '. Advantage: you use the tools you're already familiar with.
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…
By that logic we should just make "ed" the default editor. It's more like every other line oriented CLI interface element in the system than Nano is.
Power users and Linux geeks might prefer Vim, rightfully, but neither Vim nor Ed are good defaults. Both mandate having them used before as a prerequesite. You want something that as many people as possible can use out of the box as the default.
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…
I'm talking shift+arrow, ctrl+arrow, ctrl+c, ctrl+v... I know how to do it the vim way and often do, but when you jumping between vim and the rest of the world it just becomes annoying to remember to NOT use those. I find the rest of vim doesn't conflict too much... although occasionally I will accidentally type a c when selecting text outside of vim.
Unfortunately a significant chunk of what is "intuitive" is about familiarity which in turn can be more to do with commonality. Not all, but not none.
I used to be a nano user but now whenever I want to use a terminal text editor I will almost always use micro as it has built in support for most languages. https://micro-editor.github.io/
nano is usually installed by default
When I got into Linux there was no nano, only vi and ed. Pico came later with the Pine e-mail client.
There was a time (2006?) when I was getting into linux. I was a big microsofty, due to comfort mostly, and I was shamed into trying Linux. Like most people I went Ubuntu first, but wifi drivers at the time were lacking, and nvidia of yore was certainly not better than nvidia of now. Suffice it to say: I spent a lot of time in the terminal trying to fix things. Nano was my tool of choice because: honestly the initial…
Couple weeks ago I learned hard way that : key just don’t work in certain combination of host locale and VNC client and client locale. C-c didn’t work, Ctrl+Alt+F2 didn’t work, ssh didn’t work because sshd is not up yet, even VM power cycling button was stuck and didn’t work. Maybe a custom VNC client could have worked. I think I ended up rebooting the host once, just to get out of vi . Second time I just changed loc…
Highly reminiscent of #378: * nano? Real Programmers use emacs. * Hey. Real Programmers use vim. * Well, Real Programmers use ed. * No, Real Programmers use cat. * Real Programmers use a magnetized needle and a steady hand. * Excuse me, but Real Programmers use butterflies. They open their hands and let the delicate wings flap once. The disturbances ripple outward, changing the flow of the eddy currents in the upper…
That's given me a lot less patience for people wishing to re-train me for some alternate way do do the very basic things in life. Standard interface design is a great idea. The standards we use, even QWERTY, are a lot better than many would give them credit for.
There was a time (2006?) when I was getting into linux. I was a big microsofty, due to comfort mostly, and I was shamed into trying Linux. Like most people I went Ubuntu first, but wifi drivers at the time were lacking, and nvidia of yore was certainly not better than nvidia of now. Suffice it to say: I spent a lot of time in the terminal trying to fix things. Nano was my tool of choice because: honestly the initial…
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 home directory with my own config files. My user is “pi” or “root” or something to that effect. I have been logged in there before, but each time I need to find my way around from scratch. All I need to do is edit some files and get the hell out. And nano is just perfect for it.
Perhaps the worst use of vi-as-a-default is in Cygwin (used to run git on windows by some people still) where vi is popped up to let windows users fill in a git commit message. Fantastic UX. I don’t blame Cygwin for it, but git-for-windows could ship with a different default (even notepad would have been better).