me like use nano. nano say how do thing. nano exit easy.
The image is misleading. The brain sizes represent the amount of grey matter it takes to operate the editor. The nano guy has plenty of brain power left over for things like hygiene, breathing and basic reasoning.
vim guy, emacs guy look big brain. me brain smol. me bathe yesterday, thank you.
I don’t get why there’s so much prejudice towards nano users in the Linux community, people act like nano is useless but it performs its job well, and it does it without being large or overly complicated.
Vim users: “I feel bad for you”
Nano users: “I don’t think about you at all”
Nano users :
Me no think
Nano users have more important things to think about, saying this as an nvim user
OP suggests otherwise.
Oh yeah? Well this says otherwise.
I think it’s more likely the opposite.
nano gang represent😎
I can use Vim, it was the choice for years. But I actually like using nano because it’s what I need and all I need.
I actually prefer micro
Honestly nano is perfect for quick edits. Vim and Emacs are powerful, but sometimes you just want to open a config file, change one line, and exit without fighting the editor. 😄
I do appreciate this in nano. It helps me complete the new container config occasionally required to install vim.
I’m team nano, I’m not smart enough to use the other two and for whenever I need to open a text file in terminal only environment once every year I can remember how to navigate nano. So I’ll keep using nano.
It has nothing to do with intelligence. vi and emacs are just rote memorization and also endless installation of plugins and configuration. They are slow to pick up, but very powerful and also ergonomic once you know what to do.
A modern GUI like CSCode is faster to pickup and immediately very powerful.
A good emacs or vim configuration tailored to your needs can stay with you for decades. It’s stable, reliable, and does everything already. vim has released less than one point update per year for more than 2 years. During that time Sublime and VSCode had dozens, if not hundreds.
For most people the choice of editor doesn’t make a huge difference. They spend far more time reading than writing code.
Nano is the right choice for you.
I use emacs but it’s only convenient to me with a lot of custom stuff on top. Vanilla emacs tho, hell no.
neovim user (inside zellij) and same. More of a full blown IDE than an editor.
Also for the keybind memory impaired like myself:
Yep, I’ve gradually gone from using vim motions in VSCode to using Neovim with basically all the functionality I need for backend (.NET and TypeScript) and infrastructure work.
There are still some things I have to rebuild some muscle memory for, but it’s been great. I haven’t made it to zellij yet but that’s the next step.
Yes. It’s newby-friendly, what is great for the time every 2 or 3 years that it opens in my face and there’s no alternative editor installed.
Copy and paste are there too, but there’s no reason to use them instead of the terminal buffer, so I can edit things in an editor I like. I just wish it made it easier to delete several lines at the same time.
CTRL-K,K,K…
That’s racist
Hey, what’s the benefit in using vim with containers? I usually just apt install and get on with it.
Omega-level container brain
My computer my choice
There is a right choice and you know it. Stop bring silly and say it out loud!
(Duck and cover, flame war!)
Fortunately, every computer comes equipped with an “exit editor” button. It’s on the back, attached to the power supply unit. You just flick the switch. Exits every editor known to humanity. /j
Ah, the famous NCIS way of exiting editors.
Thanks, I hate it!
Never ceases to amaze me how people get so exercised over a text editor.
I remember the time when Linux jokes were about audio drivers and X11 config files, but audio has long been working out of the box, and X11 is already dead and cremated.
Even recompiling kernel now takes around five minutes instead of two hours, so that joke is irrelevant too.
So all we are left with is timeless discussion of which text editor is the best, and dumping on Windows.
This has been a lighthearted fake rivalry for as long as these text editors have existed.
That’s because we all know which is the obvious superior text editor.
Windows 11 Notepad.
The AI helps me corrupt my .txt faster.
Helix, the true choice among champions.
Neovim-HEAD or you’re a boomer.
I’d even say as long as text editors have existed at all
But I wouldn’t be surprised if the memes give outsiders the impression that there is a real text editor war.
It’s not a war, war implies a fight, it’s a one sided massacre.
So all we are left with is timeless discussion of which text editor is the best,
Gnome sucks!
Ducks and runs away
Bullshit, gedit is great
How long before gedit depends on systemd??
X11 is already dead and cremated
So all we are left with is timeless discussion of which text editor is the best, and
dumping on Windows.why it is nanoFTFY. :P
the ootb audio drivers on my thinkpad running fedora sound better than my work windows laptop
Real answer: those things matter to me because a quick frictionless experience very heavily dependant on muscle memory really helps with my ADHD. Laggy interfaces, having to hold left key for several seconds, and similar issues quickly pull my out of my train of thought.
It’s not about shaving 2 minutes off my day, it’s about not interrupting the flow.
Most tradespeople will have favoured tools. It might be for woodworking, plumbing, electrics, plastering or writing code.
There’s little point in being tribal about it, but conversations will happen.
when nerds fight, it’s the text editors that suffer
Because there is only one objectively right answer. Anyone who use anything else is no true unix user.
You mean a Rubik’s cube.
I love nano. I used to do tech support for a Linux-based content management system (before SAaS take took off)… The customer sysadmins were sometimes whichever engineer was volun-told to do it, so competency varied wildly.
I helped mostly with installs. This might be the poor newbie sysadmin’s first time on the command line. Nano was my go-to suggestion for editing config files–all the commands are right there! Much less intimidating than vi or emacs for a newbie.
Nano you can pick up in ten minutes and master in an afternoon. By that time you’re still reading the intro to vim or eMacs.
Helix:
nano is usually built in. Adding another one is just redundant if all you’re using it for is editing an occasional config file.
Honestly never understood the hate for it. Who cares? Petty, stupid, nerd-wars over little crap like a text editor is the reason average people don’t even consider linux.
I very rarely see people hate nano (except a few comments in this thread), and I always see nano recommended as the text editor when people give advice on doing things in the command line
I see vim preinstalled more than nano (e.g. in container images). I’ve been trying to convert to micro, though. It has better support for terminal emulators than nano.
micro enters the chat.
Static, portable binary with no dependencies.
Out of the box:
- Syntax highlighting
- Multi-line cursors like Sublime Text
- Mouse support (works incredibly well)
- Splits and tabs for working on multiple files
- Diff gutter
- Copy and paste with system clipboard
- Cross-platform (runs basically on anything that Go does)
- Sane key binds (ctrl-s, ctrl-c, ctrl-v, ctrl-z, ctrl-x, etc)
- Terminal emulator
- Plugin system to extend it
- And much much more
I have nothing to do with the project but this binary is the absolute best. curl or wget to any host and away you go with effectively a Sublime Text / VSCode like in the terminal. It’s as simple as nano and as functional as a well configured and extended vim.
It’s baffling it’s not more well known and not installed by default on major distros.
That’s not a text editor, that’s an IDE.
And emacs is an operating system 😂
And vim is a way of life
I’m glad we all agree that nano is the one true text editor.
/s
IMO it needs better LSP support and things like refactoring, smart auto completion, and go to definition for a range of languages to be considered an ide.
But you can edit text with it.
I use nano because I can’t be assed to memorize key bindings, but I’ll give this a go
Hahaha
Memorize
Okay guess what the keybind for Copy is in micro
Go on, guess
YEAH THAT’S RIGHT IT’S CONTROL+C
Now guess what Paste is
YOU GOT IT
Quit? Find? Undo? Save? Open?
If you guessed anything weird, that’s on you.
My only complaint is that Ctrl+N is “find next” instead of Ctrl+G, but you can remap keybinds at will, so it’s not that big of a deal.
If only I could get copy paste working when using micro over ssh. inside a document it works fine but I can’t get it to put stuff on my system clipboard
to use the system clipboard I select with the mouse while holding shift, then do ctrl-shift-c iirc. That’ll use the terminal emulator highlight and the system clipboard. At least on my machine, using kitty. Idk all the pieces that need to be in place for this to work.
Yep, and then Ctrl+Shift+V for paste.
But if you’re pasting from Micro to Micro, and it’s from the same session (horizontal/vertical splits, other tabs, elsewhere in the same document), you don’t need to go to the system clipboard and can drop the Shift.
How many Linux distros include micro in their minimal image? Vim, emacs, and nano are good because I can connect to just about any container or Linux VM and expect to have all of them available.
Let’s say I have a test that always passes on my machine but fails in CI. If I can get a terminal on the test runner, I can open up my test code in vim, add extra logging and error handling, and rerun the test to check my fix.
I am not going to install additional editors in a VM that will be recreated next time I push a code change. If I am setting up a development environment for long term use, I will install my favorite IDE and configuring all the bells and whistles.
the same old argument that anal sex is good because it works on more people
you might appreciate it, but being preinstalled is not the selling point you think it is. I spend hundreds of times longer in the editor than installing it. I want something good while I’m using it. I don’t care if it takes me 30 seconds to install, and maybe no one should.
Wow I love this argument, you’re bang on 😆
Most include micro iirc
I use micro. It’s 1000x better.
Pico…I’m going the wrong direction
Ugh. At least two decades I’ve used them and never made that connection. Thank you. And curse you. lol
Peta
Today I learned about the existence of “milli” and “kilo”, both of which are terminal-based text editors! Quite interesting. I wonder if there are any more SI unit prefix text editors…
Holding out for a cursed deca
Nano with a few config options by default?
I was coming here to say “what about micro?”
Doesn’t come standard like nano tho for a lot of distros
barely an inconvenience, you’re one curl away from it
Assuming you have internet access lmao
idk if I ever set up a new machine without internet access, but sure
there are corner cases you’ll need to use what’s available. They should be exceptions.
nano is just a text editor, I use it as a text editor, it has keybindings on screen by default, no need to config or memorise, why bother? (for text editing, not whatever people use vim or emacs for)
Kind of, but not really? Nano by default displays US English(?) keyboard bindings which are different to the keyboard I have, so I still have to have a cheat sheet open when I’m on a system with nano-only editor.
There are exceptions to everything.
