I’m delighted to learn that nano releases have codenames like “Among the fields of barley”, “Tax the rich, pay the teachers”, and “And don’t you eat that yellow snow”.
Markdown syntax support is a very nice addition. While most people don’t use Nano as their day-to-day text editor, it makes a very nice tool for quickly editing configuration files or writing Git commits. Although I think that Vim is always worth learning (at least to a decent level of familiarity to figure out whether modal editing suits how you think), Nano is probably a better choice for a default $EDITOR on premade Linux images and other similar situations.
Vim is always worth learning for technology enthusiasts, that much I’m in total agreement with.
However, i I want to provision an account for my wife to use on my Linux box, I would get about 15 seconds into “Let me explain the concept of modal editing” before she would time out and wander off to pet our dog :)
This is in no way an indictment of her intelligence. She is orders of magnitude smarter than I am in just about every way, but she has a very short attention span for technology.
It seems many don’t know that it is a clone of Pico, the editor used in the Pine email client.
Interestingly, for a long time, Nano’s documentation seemed to kinda assume familiarity with Pico and it spent a lot of time explaining differences between the two.
To me that connection is obvious. But as you say, there are probably lots of Nano users that doesn’t know about it. People going to college now are even younger than Nano itself. When my father went to med school in the 90’s he showed me how to send email with pine on the university’s Unix systems. These days universities have other preferred applications for e-mail (^_^)
Huh, that’s very different from my experience. I definitely wouldn’t say that the sysadmins that I’ve worked with are vim enthusiasts, but they all use vi since they can trust that it’ll be installed on a system. Many have had familiarity with ed as well.
I would say a bit under half know how to use vi/vim. Most probably know the very basics (insert mode, :wq), but in general I don’t know many people who use vim as their editor of choice. There’s a couple emacs guys, but the most common editor I see used on Linux servers is Nano. Most of my current and former coworkers are <30, which might have something to do with it.
I’m delighted to learn that nano releases have codenames like “Among the fields of barley”, “Tax the rich, pay the teachers”, and “And don’t you eat that yellow snow”.
Very refreshing to hear that they’re keeping the fun in computing
Words to live by. Except the barley thing. I suppose that’s just words.
It’s a Sting song reference I think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fields_of_Gold
Markdown syntax support is a very nice addition. While most people don’t use Nano as their day-to-day text editor, it makes a very nice tool for quickly editing configuration files or writing Git commits. Although I think that Vim is always worth learning (at least to a decent level of familiarity to figure out whether modal editing suits how you think), Nano is probably a better choice for a default $EDITOR on premade Linux images and other similar situations.
Vim is always worth learning for technology enthusiasts, that much I’m in total agreement with.
However, i I want to provision an account for my wife to use on my Linux box, I would get about 15 seconds into “Let me explain the concept of modal editing” before she would time out and wander off to pet our dog :)
This is in no way an indictment of her intelligence. She is orders of magnitude smarter than I am in just about every way, but she has a very short attention span for technology.
I’ve started using micro as a nano replacement. It’s pretty good for writing prose.
Interesting. Why do you say this? Especially in comparison to any other terminal based text editor like nano or vim.
….haven’t you ever heard of Microprose?
(I don’t know if that’s the joke they were going for or not…)
Mouse support, word wrap and default CUA key bindings, mostly. Makes it act like most “normal” GUI text areas. Give it a try!
Some minor thoughts on Nano:
It seems many don’t know that it is a clone of Pico, the editor used in the Pine email client.
Interestingly, for a long time, Nano’s documentation seemed to kinda assume familiarity with Pico and it spent a lot of time explaining differences between the two.
Pine and Pico live on in the Alpine mail client.
Heck I remember Pine being the successor of the Elm mail client (Pine Is Not Elm).
To me that connection is obvious. But as you say, there are probably lots of Nano users that doesn’t know about it. People going to college now are even younger than Nano itself. When my father went to med school in the 90’s he showed me how to send email with pine on the university’s Unix systems. These days universities have other preferred applications for e-mail (^_^)
I love nano and have always found it more intuitive than vim.
Being it a lot simpler than vim, most people (including myself) use vim.
I like how the commands are listed at the bottom. I always use it on servers.
I disagree with the notion that most people use vim. Even among sysadmins I know, few of them prefer vim.
Being a programmer that works with sysadmins on a daily basis, I can confirm that almost none of them use vim.
EDIT: Not that, that’s a problem. I could care less. Just an interesting tidbit.
In your experience what editor is the most used?
notepad.exe
:(
Visual Studio and Notepad++:
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#development-environments-and-tools
Don’t take it the wrong way, but perhaps you need to widen your connections. The vast majority of sysadmins/devops folks I know are vim enthusiasts.
Huh, that’s very different from my experience. I definitely wouldn’t say that the sysadmins that I’ve worked with are vim enthusiasts, but they all use vi since they can trust that it’ll be installed on a system. Many have had familiarity with ed as well.
I would say a bit under half know how to use vi/vim. Most probably know the very basics (insert mode, :wq), but in general I don’t know many people who use vim as their editor of choice. There’s a couple emacs guys, but the most common editor I see used on Linux servers is Nano. Most of my current and former coworkers are <30, which might have something to do with it.