Re:Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)
by anyfoo on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @08:53PM
(#18605162)
As an OS developer myself, I can tell you that logging into platforms to quickly tweak something using vi happens all the time. It's not about "directly developing" on the platforms, it's about debugging and trying things out.
nano is a very young editor, comparably, invented in 1999, and GPL on top of that. I'm not sure it even come out of the box with any of the BSDs (OpenBSD at least does not seem to have it).
vi was first written by Bill Joy himself in 1976, and I'm pretty sure it proliferated in many different forms over many, many different platforms.
mg, I don't know!
Maybe I'm wrong but I really don't think embedded developers do a lot of work directly on platforms that low level/limited.
You do your development on your main machine, automate deployment to your target, and debug using a gdb server or openocd.
Honestly mg or nano is more ubiquitous than vi. Any system that has vi installed will likely have nano as well.