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.
I mean yeah, sorta, sometimes. But other times u get back that vibe of “I just don’t care to learn something new, I’d rather do the bare minimum and I’m not really hungry to learn new things”. And recognizing the presence of this attitude is what causes the looking down upon.
Vs
What you should do is...
I remember stumbling on to them in my first job and thinking an very much appreciating their power over having to write a small program to iterate through an arbitrary # of files to do something... and another small program if I wanted to do something slightly different, etc.
People need to check how they encourage other people or promote things. You probably weren’t wrong about feeling looked down upon. Even if they really thought you would benefit.
Just say "nano is Linus Torvald's editor of choice" (which is true and will instantly shut down the debate)
> I really need to switch over to something that is actually maintained and does utf-8 properly. Probably 'nano'.
https://www.tag1consulting.com/blog/interview-linus-torvalds...
I tend to use nano because I'm mostly making changes to config files and the like so I mostly want simple.
Personally I look with pity at people who invest in cargo-culting the idiosyncrasies of systems from ancient times which simply don't apply anymore.
But the correct answer is ansible or it’s ilk- not being told that managing things one by one is “fine”.
Or like in nano, relegating oneself to managing files character by character.
It's interesting how the winds have changed toward Vim advocacy in a quarter century or so.
I switched to Vim around 1994, amidst a definitely anti-vi climate. In the university environment, almost nobody used vi. I remember nothing but vi trash talk.
The computing environment was proprietary Unix without a whole lot of freeware at all. Free Unix was just beginning to rise in the word. Only in the freeware world surrounding the Linux kernel and GNU utilities did I begin to discover alternative programs like Vim, still far from any sort of mainstream at that time.
I saw all this trash talking as weakness; by making fun of trivialities like the command sequence to get out of a program, you're just showing you're a moron. I looked into it and found it wasn't difficult at all.
Until then, all editors I ever used were fundamentally modeless: type characters to insert. I was curious about what it's like to use the modal editor after training oneself in its use.
I was quite pleasantly surprised; the naysayers were bigger morons than I thought. There are all these useful commands that can be touch-typed without any modifier keys!
Taking every key that produces a printable character and turning it into a command which inserts that character is an incredibly ill-considered decision. I mean, the machine can do anything you want, and you're insisting that it behave like a typewriter.
Because the computer/terminal keyboard traces its inspiration to the ancient typewriter, whose keys are mechanically linked to hammers that produce the characters those keys are labeled with, it must be so in a computer's editing program also. That is parochial thinking.
I don't understand how someone can go from, say, playing a game of Tetris where the unmodified keys ijkl control the falling pieces, to editing text, and suddenly insist that in this editing context, it must be that ijkl simply insert their image into the buffer. Like keys being commands is just something for games; editing is typewriter-like, so we simulate a typewriter, end of story.
Moreover, to be so vehement about this, so dead-set against the idea that an editor might be driven somewhat like a Tetris game, so as to not even give it a chance, in spite of relying on editing for enough years to become a programmer.
I still laugh at the word vi being the translation from Aztec of "how do I get out of this shit"
For context, I started with Linux in 1993, by making changes to the kernel. Vi was the editor of choice and I took it like I do with cultures of the countries I visit: I keep the comments to myself.
So I suffered in silence until I discovered joe (an editor based on Wordpress key bindings) and that was a great change.
I know 3 or 4 commands in vi, enough to make the changes five times a year when I have to use it somewhere
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 horrible latency to machines half a world away (or, a few miles away but the network is crappy) and being able to send just a few keystrokes and get a lot of power out of it is helpful.
That’s not counting all the “repeat” patterns or complex search and replace.
I remember still when I got my first job as a junior sysadmin, I spent a really long time logging in to each machine, updating a config file, logging out then going to the next one.
I didn’t need to be told that “ssh and nano is fine”, I needed to be told “there are better tools that you should invest in learning, because they will repay you back thousandfold”.
What I thought were people looking down on me were in fact people looking at me with hopeless pity, because I fought the idea of learning vim.