Perhaps you're right...or perhaps the Encyclopaedia Galactica is a better tool for navigating the galaxy if you're willing to learn a trick or two about how to navigate it? No one ever argued that the Restaurant at the End of the Universe was the BEST restaurant, only that it was the one at the end.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake moving away from 'ed' in the first place, and some said that even 'ed' had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left punch cards.

*Ahem*

mcedit

under sung hero of easy tui text editors. [Has controls on screen.]

overlooked because it's part of mc, and thus does not show up in the text editor categories in package managers and websearches?

could do a similar THGTTG bit for it. ... or other parodies of other stuff... idk, my brain not conjuring such things with ease just now.

(And yes, I missed the reference, at first, too... Thought about responding with some contrived towel elaboration).

I understand why. People tried using vi/vim but couldn't figure out how to exit the app. On the other hand, with Emacs, you need to use 4 keystrokes to do anything. It does not surprise me why nano is way used by default.

I'm ashamed to admit that, despite having read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy several times, my Vim elitist mindset made me miss the reference.

Sometimes you need a real good slice of humble pie to remember what's important in life.

ed is the standard text editor

Nano's used because it's easier to use, which means the user interface is more intuitive than the others who insist you hit a key before making an edit.

I like Nano; it lets me do what I need to do quickly, simply and efficiently.

Both nano and emacs suffer from the same problem - bad defaults. You need to pass like ten options to nano for it to work as expected to edit configuration files and small scripts.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in making text editors in the first place. And some said that even making the operating system had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have built computers at all.

I've used Vim, NeoVim, Micro, mg(1), JOE, and even MS Edit (both the original DOS version and the recent Rust clone). No matter how complex and tailored I wrote my config, though, the features I actually used were included in GNU nano and/or my command shell without any of the bugs, bloat, learning curve, or slop.

Using it as my default just makes sense.

Example of optimocracy

People don’t have to look up “how to exit nano”

oh no, not again.

That’s because Ubuntu, honestly.

It's there and it's easy. Most people don't use terminal text editors unless they are SSHing in a server, and they would only do that sporadically, so it makes no sense to become proficient in a complex text editor like vim or Emacs for that little use case.

Sidenote: personally, I learned vim once, and used it extensively every day for two years. I stopped using it for one year and was back to square one. Now I use vscode for everything... Even when I'm using SSH, because vscode supports SSH

I see Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy parody, I updoot