linuxmemes

Kate

Me no love nano, me brain only can use nano.

E macs scary. vim no let me leave :(

vim, because that's how my father taught me, and how his father's father taught him.

Choose vim! The generational trauma of file editors!

As a new Linux user who spends as little time editing config files as I can manage, I'm fine with nano.

It's worse than the picture depicts. It's not just the lovers, the elitists and the evangelists, it's the sheer range of choice too, beyond the loudest.

Why would you need a text editor when you can just do cat > file ?

smh

First choice: use a normal damn GUI text editor

Second choice: Nano. It's simple and comprehensible, and a best CLI choice for newbies. You can then turn to vim, emacs, or whatever, but don't make your life harder from the get-go

People suggesting to start with Vim are probably the same ones pushing for Arch as a first distro. C'mon.

I install micro. I intend to use micro. My fingers type nano anyways. Every time.

Let the editor holy wars (re)start!

Vim is the one true editor, and the heretics who claim otherwise shall be driven forth and sent to ~~re-education~~ linux boot camps to learn the true ways.

ed is the standard editor

vi because it's everywhere, even on servers where packages can't be downloaded or shouldn't be installed.

I use Micro in the terminal - it offers good desktop integration with keys similar to DEs like ctrl+v and ctrl+c, rather than being terminal centred. So it's nice if you're mainly in a desktop but pop in to a terminal occasionally.
I use Kate outside the terminal

But really which text editor you use depends on what you use it for and how often. Vim is very powerful and allows very fast use & productivity if you learn it properly and probably very useful if you spend a lot of time in the terminal or TTY, but Nano is more straight forward and easy for a lot of basic terminal based work.

My requirements for a text editor:

• it displays 'A' when I press the 'A' key
• doesn't require more than 1 minute of learning to use it

Bonus points if it comes pre installed.

I'm a emacs guy, but nano should be the only one installed by default. The default editor should tell you how to exit!

Nano because I'm too lazy to learn vim or emacs. I want something that works and not something that operates like cheat codes in old video games.

pico!

Helix is really rad

Helix?

I use Vim, which has some really handy tricks that I use somewhat often (eg, type :r! followed by a terminal command and it will add the standard output of said command to the bottom of your file).

That being said, there's nothing wrong with Nano. Most distros come with it out of the box nowadays, and its learning curve is practically nonexistent compared to the alternatives.

Even worse: I like GUI editors like Kate/KDE Develop/Geany/VSCode. Unless it is on a server obviously.

Wait until you get cornered by elite Helix enjoyers

Nothing wrong with Kate. I know how to use Nano because it's an essential skill for when your machine boots into emergency mode, but aside from that editing text from the terminal is lunacy.

ed is the standard text editor.

I see the Helix cucumber got left at the grocery store

None of them. I need a texteditor, not an unusable wannabe miracle machine for which you need documentation and a diploma just to exit it.

The reasons us elders use VI is because on a new installation, it was the only thing available until:

1. You are lucky enough to find a compiled version of PINE/PICO, or

2. You have the compiler installed, and can get the source code and build it yourself.

For some reason, some elitists decided that if you don't know that, then you are a failure. But honestly, when modern distros started coming out with WYSIWYG-type editors, it was a relief, even though I reverted to VI/VIM because of muscle-memory, I do not push it on new users. It's the same argument people make for driving manual vs automatic, sure it's useful, but when was the last time you even saw a manual car? (At least in North America).

You want to live dangerously, go ahead and put NetBSD with just the basics and leave the rest of us who want to do something useful alone.

Emacs with Vim’s modal editing.

All I'm gonna say is than nano is installed on almost every Linux os and has the keyboard shortcuts written on the UI.

Do you need operating system? Select emacs

Do you want to be elite coder? Select (neo)vim

Do you need to just edit .conf files? Select nano