>[Text editing is] all done in a traditional terminal, although I don't use 'vi'. I use this abomination called "micro-emacs", which has absolutely nothing to do with GNU emacs except that some of the key bindings are similar. I got used to it at the University of Helsinki when I was a wee lad, and I've not been able to wean myself from it, although I suspect I will have to soon enough. I hacked up (a very limited) utf-8 support for it a few years ago, but it's really showing its age, and showing all the signs of having been written in the 80's and the version I use was a fork that hasn't been maintained since the mid 90's.
> University of Helsinki used it because it worked on DOS, VAX/VMS and Unix, which is why I got introduced to it. And now my fingers are hardcoded for it. I really need to switch over to something that is actually maintained and does utf-8 properly. Probably 'nano'. But my hacked-up piece of historical garbage works just barely well enough that I've never been really forced to teach my old fingers new tricks.
[0] https://www.tag1consulting.com/blog/interview-linus-torvalds...
It was very hard to force myself to stop using it and learn vi!
It's decent enough for times when you want to do something quick on cli. And then spend rest of the time with graphical IDEs...
In other words, I would not use nano as my primary editor, but it's perfect as a secondary. If I need to edit more than a few lines, I'll just load up the file on my usual IDE.
I totally get why people use vim (and emacs) in fact I use vim for one specific thing I can not do in intellij (highlight closing parens in docblocks - intellij doesn't do it and if you are writing annotations it's a major pita that it doesnt).
Honestly I don't mind vim, but I prefer nano. And I spend 24/7 coding in my terminal. Nano covers all my needs and then some.
And while you should absolutely not switch vim to nano if you enjoy vim, I would totally encourage you to play around with nano a bit more. You may be positively surprised at what you find.
I prefer nano too; trying to learn vim. But my coding happens in either Qt Creator or VS Code.
0. Use cat and output to a file to really quickly make a new file from your clipboard or from the web
1. Nano is great for editing config / text files quickly and the learning curve is really low due to a more modern design.
2. vim can be reliably found everywhere on nearly any unix machine but the learning curve is much higher initial learning curve vim has more customization than vi and has basically replaced vi on modern installations of unix
3. emacs has out of the box has a learning curve less than vi but can't be found everywhere and you probably have to install it but it also has a large amount of extendability. the initial learning curve is a bit low but then it gets higher and higher. It also has multiple versions and a GUI and a package manager.
nano is a clone of pico, the text editor for the pine email client, so "modern" is definitely a matter of some interpretation here. :)
"Use the right tool for the job" is all well and good (I mean, who wants to use the _wrong_ tool for a job?) but can lead to false dichotomies around tools which are designed to solve the same fundamental problems/use cases. I would posit that the model you suggest only is applicable to people with limited experience with vim, nano (and/or emacs). I would generally recommend that someone picks one and runs with it.
emacsclient makes it just as easy to edit a text file extremely quickly with Emacs as to open a new vim or nano in place.
> emacs [...] initial learning curve is a bit low but then it gets higher and higher
Emacs's difficulty is, for simple editing cases that you could use nano for, only a little bit more difficult than nano, and certainly easier than vim - no modal editing, and you can learn the essential shortcuts (save, undo, open, close) in very little time.
I don't agree that the learning curve increases - more complex things require that you learn more about Emacs, sure, but my experience has been that it's about as easy to go from beginner to intermediate Vim knowledge as it is in Emacs, if not slightly easier due to the latter's better design and documentation.
> emacs [...] can't be found everywhere
TRAMP has been around for two decades now, making this largely irrelevant - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26982916
I wouldn't wanna use it every day, but it has its time and place.
Everybody should know a little ed though, it's not that hard.
I respect his lead, but that discourages contribution.
Disclaimer: I'm a very sporadic nano contributor.
I wouldn’t say it does so across the board. Rather, it filters contributions to only encourage those of the kind they desire.
There’s also the question of whether they even want “more contribution”. The less features, the less maintenance burden… Less maintenance burden, easier for fewer people to accomplish the work… Fewer people means less coordinating effort.
Simplicity seems to lead to a virtuous cycle here.
But that's for small editing tasks. For coding I use VSCode or a JetBrains product.
If the commit file is empty, that cancels the commit. Nano will tell me how many lines it actually wrote, so if I have second thoughts I can cancel with certainty. Nano may well not be unique in that regard, but I tripped over another editor that saved what I thought was an empty file as a single line with just the EOL character.
:cqAny programming I do is in Jetbrain IDEs.
But I saw a comment here long ago that says it's worth learning vim keybinds, even if you never use vim. Because you can be sure, no matter what IDE or editor you end up using, someone has created a vim keybinds plugin. You can have the same keybinds across everything.
I've never gotten around to learning though.
Those are not always standardized across editors.
Jumping to a character, deleting a block - while vim does have bindings for these, I've never found myself using them. For the latter especially, moving to the start of the block and then selecting to the end of the block is better to me just because it lines up with my eyes scanning the thing I'm planning to delete. With vim I would have to pause and double-check what I'm about to delete anyway, and if it doesn't fit in one page I'd have to move around to inspect it anyway.
I'm surprised when programmers use it, sure, but that's because if my profession was going to require editing text files for hours a day (which it does), I would be happy to trade a steeper learning curve now for a less unpleasant job experience later.
I totally understand why non-programmers don't use it. If your job does not involve you editing text files for hours a day, then nano (or a graphical editor - gedit, kedit, notepad?) is inarguably a better choice for you than emacs or vim - the effort involved will probably never pay off.
ed users: you have my respect, which I will dispense from a distance.