this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2026
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huh
ctrl x ctrl s go brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
me use nano too, emacs vim scary.
Vim and emacs are really worth it when you do a lot of writing and editing (whether it be code or text). If you only occasionally edit config files nano is completely fine. However I do recommend to learn stuff like exiting and saving in vim because no matter what, about every single distro has some form of vim so you might encounter it in imporant scenarios and then you know your way around.
I have, in the past, recommended, if you use Unix systems in a technical way, knowing at least how to do the following in vi (and I use emacs):
Close the program, discarding changes. From vim's command mode,
: q ! RET.Exit writing changes. From vim's command mode,
: w q RET.Move the cursor around. Today, usually you can get by with arrow keys -- I haven't been on a system where one thing or another was dicked up in a way that rendered arrow keys unusable in many years, but from Vim's command mode, "h", "j", "k", and ""l.
Enter insert mode to Insert text. From vim's command mode, "i".
Exit insert mode. From vim's insert mode, ESC.
Search for text. From vim's command mode, "/", the text to search for, and RET.
Replace text. From vim's command mode, ":%s/foo/bar/g" to change all instances of foo to bar in a given file.
If you've got that much and you ever find yourself on a system that only has vi available (and it may not be vim), you can at least do the basics.
But the widespread deployment of
nanohas made learning basic vi less important than was once the case. Even very small systems that I've run into tend to havenano.Note that busybox, a popular statically-linked shell often used in a rescue-the-horribly-broken-system scenario, does not have nano but does have a minimal "vi"-alike, so you might still want to know vi in that case.
Thats exactly the kind of stuff I meant.
Micro is somewhere there too.
It was originally
pico, which IIRC was bundled with thepineemail client (a "tree name" pun offelm, an older email client, whose name came from "ELectronic Mail"; this pun extended to many other Unix email clients, like mulberry and such). I think that "pico" probably stood for something like "PIne COmposer". Because it was designed to be particularly approachable, listed the basic commands at the bottom of the screen, and pine was installed on a lot of systems, it kind of got adopted as the "Unix notepad for the terminal"a simple editor that most users could use for lightweight tasks. Then IIRC due to pine predating standard open-source licenses, the nano clone was created to be GPL.
searches
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pico_(text_editor)
Yeah, it's "pine composer", it was indeed bundled with pine. And apparently part of the problem was that the license didn't fully spell out the conditions under which it could be redistributed.
I'm only ever using a command line text editor for changing the odd config file, so for me the benefits of vim or emacs has never outweighed the hassle of figuring them out. So I stick with nano.