I don’t think NetBSD and yourself are using the term in the same context.

By this I mean, a beginner to NetBSD is already a far more competent user than a beginner in many other contexts of OS users.

Micro is MIT licensed, so it should be shippable in NetBSD base.

https://github.com/micro-editor/MICRO

But written in Go, and I would expect the NetBSD base only includes software buildable using tools already in the base system.

11 MB is also a lot bigger than 48k

I do think Micro is a nice editor, but we need a tiny, BSD licensed pico/nano for true beginners

I didn't realize the size difference was so huge.

Atto has a great man page that would give a user everything they needed to know if they were unfamiliar with emacs keybindings.

Good point

Nothing in the README file says the point is to be "beginner-friendly"; as far as I can tell, that's something that Hacker News or whoever submitted this used as a description. Neither the word "beginner" nor the word "friendly" appear in the README; its goal is to "be the smallest fuctional Emacs in less than 2000 lines of C."

tl;dr: I think somebody incorrectly described Atto as comparable to nano/pico, and these comments are dragging it because it's not the thing that it was never meant to be.

The post says "To ease the transition for new users".

It's using keystrokes inspired by emacs. Ok.

As we all know, beginners love Emacs keystrokes.

It's what they're used to, if they went to uni in the early 90s and were frozen into a block of ice since then.

Project headline is “The smallest functional Emacs in less than 2000 lines of C.”

How someone jumped to beginner-friendly from that is the real question.

Probably because the post starts "To ease the transition for new users..."?