GNU nano is a nice easy text editor... but it's so clunky when you have become comfortable with vim (perhaps the same with Emacs).
this post was submitted on 02 May 2024
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The trick is to never get comfortable with Vim or Emacs.
*taps forehead*
Using nano as a vim user is a lot less clunky than trying to use vim as a vim non-user though.
Or so I would imagine, all of the vim novices are still too busy trying to exit vim to share their experiences.
The worst and best thing you can do when using vim is learn the movement keys (h, j, k, and l) because they're so powerful and work no where else.
There is a vim mode available in a lot of other applications though.
h and l are overrated, use w, b, e and f instead.
And leap.nvim
Thanks for the recommendation
Untrue, they also work in Nethack and other rogue-likes!
Yeah, doesn't work so well when you're not using qwerty though
That's not true. I'm on qwertz and I adore vim key bindings
Okay, perhaps I should have been clearer, that's on me.
I meant qwerty and related layouts.
Things like Dvorak and Colemak, the movement keys are spread across the keyboard and if you want to navigate that way you'll pretty much have to remap them, and probably remap the keys you've swapped. For me, it's just easier to use the arrows than go through that.
I mean, yeah, of course. Vims default keys are made for the "regular" layouts. But you can Mal everything yourself if needed. I'm sure there are pre made mappings for other layouts too.
I might check that out
Using the arrows may not be the most efficient, but I'm not spending enough time in vim to make that be an issue... Though I've seriously considered trying to swap to it from VSCode
I do pretty much all editing in vim. One you "force" yourself to use hjkl, there was no going back to arrow keys. Nowadays I Mal arrow keys to move lines up and down and add or remove indentation.
Neat that it has this new modern binds mode where it understands normal copy paste and stuff
I'm a little bit excited by that
I love nano for simple things, like writing commits. Anything more complex and I use Sublime Text.
Also worth checking out helix editor. Once you do the tutorial it makes vim feel clunky
I think nano is good for quick and dirty editing.
Anything else should be done locally on your development machine with a GUI, then pushed to your server as an update.
Yeah I love nano. I can use vim a little, enough to make a change and save the output. I can even exit vim!
But 9 times out of 10 if I need to edit a text file in a terminal window, I'm just making a quick config change - I need the terminal equivalent to notepad, not the terminal equivalent to an IDE.
Nano is exactly what I need, nothing more and nothing less.
Why insist on a GUI for anything else?
apt purge nano is one of the first things I do on a new Debian installation. Much easier to remember than having to use update-alternatives, select-editor and the $EDITOR variable to convince the likes of vigr,vipw, visudo,crontab -e,... that I really want to use vim as my primary editor.
Honestly unreasonably infuriates me when I enter visudo and find myself in nano... Like, did I type nanosudo? Hell no!
Lol I wasn't aware that nano is actually a GNU project. Checking the date on Wikipedia when it became one really threw me off today morning: 2001. Man I was living behind the moon and could not exit properly the entire time!
I remember using Pico, Nano's predecessor, in the mid-to-late '90s. Nano was created because there was a desire to distribute Pico with Linux. Unfortunately, the licensing was unclear so a clone had to be made. Fortunately there was no argument about editor appearance and behaviour.
As shocking as the 2001 date might be, it seems like Pico might have ceased development as recently as the end of 2022 along with its e-mail reader parent program Alpine (formerly Pine).
If true, Nano still has a few years to go before it will overtake its parent for longevity.
(Both vi and Emacs are far older, of course.)
Annoys me that "modern" in this case means whatever Microsoft does and whatever Microsoft users are used to. Especially since a lot of those "modern" binding have been around since the 80s.
"Modern" has become one of those words that's way over used to the point of meaninglessness.
Those keybindings are prevalent outside of windows though, Ctrl+C is almost universally copy and Ctrl+V is almost universally paste - it might have been popularised by windows at some point in history but it's well beyond that.
There's an argument for consistency, especially with basic functions.
The modern keybinds might make me drop micro for nano again
same, likely switching back after a few good years with micro.
vim > all