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

GNU nano is my editor of choice

ariadne.space

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 236 posts

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice

#91

Post by ixfo »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #79
dheera wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Many of the things you mention are absolutely in nano :) Like highlighting, jumping to a line, importing.. I don't have the time to do a point by point comparison but trying nano for 5 minutes doesn't equate knowing it, just like with vim. 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…

Absolutely. I use loads of those features including regexp in nano all the time and it works fantastically well. For me it's the fact that it's small (so available on nearly every platform) and the command interface is so quick. It's light, fast, and snappy to drive - no context "shifts" to get to commands, and I can do "power user stuff" with just a simple key shortcut _which is written on the screen so you can see it_ most of the time. It's easy, and that's worth more than a thousand vims. See also the success of Visual Studio Code.

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice

#92

Post by bachmeier »

Guid_NewGuid wrote: post #14

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…

> I can see that there's not much difference between an ide and editor for new languages but why do people prefer text editing and prioritize typing speed where IDEs exist?

That's not why I use a text editor (Geany most often). I find the IDE to be complex and to bring on complexity. If I'm using a text editor the project has to remain simple. The best analogy I have was when I used Slackware. Ubuntu users would laugh because Slackware didn't have a package manager that resolved dependencies. Slackware users would laugh because Ubuntu had a packaging system so complex that it needed dependency resolution. Simply put, using a text editor imposes discipline that makes programming more fun for me.

I'm sure I would use an IDE if I were a Dilbert-style enterprise Java developer. The enterprise thing took all the fun out of programming so I took my career in a different direction.

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice

#93

Post by lcnmrn »

# highlighting for all languages

include /usr/share/nano/*.nanorc

set autoindent

set minibar

set morespace

set historylog

set linenumbers

set softwrap

set tabsize 4

set tabstospaces

Now you got a full featured IDE.

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice

#94

Post by orthoxerox »

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?

Yes, because your sysadmins won't give you sudo, so you must scp a copy of nano into your home dir. Surprise, it's an AIX server running on Power, so your x86 nano won't run. Does building one from source count as hardship?

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice

#95

Post by crazygringo »

dijit wrote: post #37
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…

The thing about that “snobbery and gate keeping” is that it’s not at all that. Maybe not everyone’s experience mimics mine but I felt like people looked down at me a bit when I was 16 for using nano on the command line. But, and here’s the kicker, if I hadnt been pushed into vim I would not be nearly as productive now. There have been countless times in my career as a sysadmin/devops/SRE where I’ve been stuck with ho…

> What I thought were people looking down on me were in fact people looking at me with hopeless pity

Or maybe they actually were looking down on you. When we feel bad in response to someone else, we're not usually misinterpreting the emotional cues.

It's not just what they say -- it's the way they say it.

Which is why the term "constructive criticism" exists. If you want to help them, then make them feel good by expanding their knowledge. But support them in their own choices and autonomy.

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice

#96

Post by trey-jones »

techrat wrote: post #78
dheera wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

> It's not gatekeeping, > you bet I will judge your ability to code by your preference of editor, FYI. That's called 'gatekeeping.'

It's kind of a misnomer then, isn't it? He's not preventing anybody from doing anything, just forming a preconception based on what I think a lot of people would agree is sound logic:

That on average, people whose first instinct is `nano` to edit a file in Linux have less experience than people whose first instinct is `vi(m)` (or, selfishly `emacs`).

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice

#98

Post by hn8788 »

trey-jones wrote: post #85
bluedino wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except when it's vi and casual vim users can't figure out why nothing works

Aren't casual vim users really vi users? I use emacs primarily but years ago created an extremely minimal (~20 lines) .vimrc to be installed by default on every server I work on. Some color, maybe indentation, I don't even know because I usually just use Emacs/TRAMP these days, but I'm nearly 100% sure that every config there works in vi. I would consider myself a casual vim/vi user in that I don't know the differenc…

I may be misremembering, but the biggest differences I remember between vi and vim as a semi-casual user is vi defaults to not supporting arrow keys, and doesn't tell you the mode it's in.

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice

#99

Post by edoceo »

crazygringo wrote: post #95
dijit wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about that “snobbery and gate keeping” is that it’s not at all that. Maybe not everyone’s experience mimics mine but I felt like people looked down at me a bit when I was 16 for using nano on the command line. But, and here’s the kicker, if I hadnt been pushed into vim I would not be nearly as productive now. There have been countless times in my career as a sysadmin/devops/SRE where I’ve been stuck with ho…

> What I thought were people looking down on me were in fact people looking at me with hopeless pity Or maybe they actually were looking down on you. When we feel bad in response to someone else, we're not usually misinterpreting the emotional cues. It's not just what they say -- it's the way they say it. Which is why the term "constructive criticism" exists. If you want to help them, then make them feel good by expa…

Have you tried...

Vs

What you should do is...

Re: GNU nano is my editor of choice

#100

Post by RandallBrown »

_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.

My dirty software engineering secret is that I don't know how to use vim. Like at all. I've been a developer for over 10 years at this point.

The only thing I remember is that some combo of hitting the escape key and typing :wq gets me out of it. When I get a new machine I have to immediately change the default editor for git so I don't get totally stuck if I need to edit a commit message.

I also use a GUI text editor for git...

I really appreciate that nano has it's shortcuts written on the screen for me to use. It's my CLI text editor of choice for that reason.

Post reply on HN