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>Hopefully this post demonstrates that nano is a quite capable editor in its own right. This post showed how to add a slightly enhanced minibar, remove the help and add syntax highlighting. It would be more important for me how to quickly navigate text.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
* arrow keys * pg up/down * find (^W) * go to line (^_) the first two are standard across applications, and the last two are in the help menu that shows up by default.
> (^_) Confusingly, this is actually not a ctrl (^) shortcut at all. It is alt-g.
alt g is another binding for the same.
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've been a really big fan of Micro[1]. A single binary with excellent out of the box features. Mouse mode, syntax highlighting, tabs etc [1] https://github.com/zyedidia/micro
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…
Quoted post unavailable.
If you really think strength of opinion indicates experience, then clearly you don't have a lot of experience with people...
So I have a question and I'd like to understand if possible. To me programming isn't text editing. Granted, we use text to write most code outside of say Pike but effectively most programming is working with symbols right? Like .subst is meaningless as an operation on a string but .substring(0, 1) is meaningful. So I don't really get the advantage of such, to my mind, rudimentary text editors. At a minimum surely bei…
First, "plain" text editors have caught up with IDEs in many ways that you're talking about here. With a good LSP plugin, you can hop to definition and autocomplete perfectly fine. For a strong statically typed language, the editor can even tell you why it won't build and how to fix it before you even try. Many things you used to need an IDE for just no longer require it.
Second, even without those tools, people hacking away at a keyboard are often doing a lot more than just writing executable code. You're editing config files, READMEs, comments, documentation templates, test data, API request examples. None of these things are amenable to any of the niceties an IDE can help with.
Third, in a microservices world or even just working on a plain library that calls into lots of other libraries, unless you download the source code for every dependency, hop to definition and autocomplete isn't guaranteed to work anyway. It's often easier to pull up the API documentation in a browser on a second monitor and refer to it while working. Screen real estate is cheap these days and the more mature projects you're better off using as dependencies anyway tend to be pretty well documented.
Fourth, an increase in the use of dynamic languages has brought with it an increase in dynamically-generated code. There's a lot of convenience here in reducing the amount of boilerplate you need to type out and being able to change behavior without even having to rewrite the core code, but it also makes IDEs less useful. It pushes the mental burden of understanding how code gets generated and runtime objects get decorated and changed by understanding the underlying data model of the language and its runtime, but hey, that's what we're paid for.
Fifth, what does it even matter in the grand scheme to have definitions and names more readily available inside the actual window you're typing into? It's a convenience, sure, but if you type subst when it should have been substring, you try to build or run a test or just a static analyzer or whatever and you get an error message and remember "oh yeah, that's Language X and I'm writing Language Y," you lost what? A minute at most to go do a global find and replace? Compared to the time studying a problem domain, designing and vetting a solution, coming up with adequate test cases and a suitable type representation that models the domain, the time spent literally typing out function names is minuscule. I'm not going to say saving seconds there is worthless, but it's not a huge gain.
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…
Quoted post unavailable.
> you bet I will judge your ability to code by your preference of editor,
FYI. That's called 'gatekeeping.'
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…
Quoted post unavailable.
I'm not big into coding anymore and nano is handy for my muscle memory, coming from DOS :) It's good enough for my purposes. Sure vim is more powerful but it's not as accessible to the casual user. It's a good tool for its job just like vim is. They're just different jobs.