Programmer Humor

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

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 see Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy parody, I updoot

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

It is preinstalled and does what it needs to do. What else can I ask for?

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'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.

Nano is to EMacs/Vim as Notepad is to Notepad++ or VSCode (Nano has features Notepad doesn't, but you get the point).

I don't do a ton of code editing directly on the CLI. I do things like change parameters in config files or open a file to read it quickly. If I'm doing more heavy editing, I'll use a GUI editor (with an SFTP extension if I'm working on a headless server). So programs like Vim and EMacs have never been useful for me.

To each their own (and I have all the respect for anyone who knows how to exit Vim without looking it up) but I'm guessing the majority of people have a similar experience.

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.

I've wanted to move elsewhere for a long time, thing is I don't use nano for programming, I use it for config files. For programming I use an IDE, and every time I've tried leaving my IDE for emacs with a language server I find I just can't be bothered to set it up and learn it and make the move. Maybe because while I have some gripes with my current setup...they're very minor

oh no, not again.

I'm in the "been working with Linux since the 90s" gang so I call vim vi and nano pico and when I started there was a coolness factor to be considered. I was incredibly uncool so I used whatever I wanted, including pico - I mean you used pine for email back in the day and the interface was nearly identical, so whatever.

But I did want to be at least a tiny bit cooler, so I learned vi in a fairly rudimentary fashion. I can edit, jump, delete, search, replace, copy and paste - oh, and I can exit. I've spent so much time using vi, that my brain doesn't even have to think about exiting, not even whether I want to write or not. It just happens like second nature. It's actually gotten to where nano seems unduly burdensome to me.

But really, I prefer an IDE for programming. CLI editors will always be for configuration files and shell scripts to me.

ed is the standard text editor

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.

Same reason people use notepad on windows. It's already installed on almost every distro

Best local simple text editor is micro.

That’s because Ubuntu, honestly.

I'm part of the "learned Linux when I got my first raspberry pi" gang, and all Ras pi tutorials tell you to use nano. So yes.

I think Vim is great if you use it everyday and know it inside out. For those of us who don't, Nano is just easier, not least because it tells you in the UI how to exit it xD

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.

Big fan of micro. Like nano, it's non-modal, but unlike nano, it doesn't need to print its shortcuts on the bottom because everyone already knows most of the shortcuts from almost every GUI editor. And it has inbuilt syntax highlighting and LSP support (TBH it's a bit much at times, the UI is a bit too intrusive to (by default) complain every time you violate some style guideline).

Though that's moot if you don't have admin privileges on the box you're working on.

I'm a vim stan. I love my vim. I still end up installing nano on all my machines. It's honestly not even for me anymore, it's for anyone else who happens to use it. Vim is great but it's got a learning curve.

Often times I'll just use vi, since it's always there.

I use nano just because it's the one that's usually installed. if it was usually Vim, I would use that instead.

I have been around since production servers were predominantly HP-UX, Solaris, and AIX. I settled on Vi because it was the one common editor that was preinstalled on every *NIX OS, including Linux and you could jump right into edit mode while reading a file without having to exit the preview first.

Nano is fine, but one you've gone through the pain of committing Vi to muscle memory, there's no point to switch.