
What’s up with nano? - wdr1
http://www.asty.org/2016/06/23/whats-up-with-nano/
======
catskull
This is something I was pondering the other day: given nano's proliferation, I
wonder how many devs use it in a regular basis? My suspicion is that nano is
more popular than vim or emacs, just used less. Many devs who do not primarily
use a command line editor use nano when they have to. It's like a screwdriver:
it's nobody's favorite tool, but it's probably the most popular.

~~~
kirrent
I wouldn't be too surprised if you were right. In an advanced comp sci class I
took recently I was surprised to find that when we had to ssh into the
university's supercomputer and edit some code something liked 75% of students
used nano and only a quarter used vim. These are people early in their career
using a low latency connection but it still surprised me.

~~~
RamenJunkie_
My experience is that it's easier to remember the commands for Nano. vi
confuses the hell out of me.

I'm not actually a Comp Sci major or anything, maybe that matters?

~~~
daveguy
It does matter. When you're editing code in all kinds of terminals over 4
years the basics become ingrained. Really knowing how to quit at first and
being able to get to the different modes makes a big difference. Also using it
on your home computer helps. Once you get used to it other editors seem
cumbersome.

------
somethingsimple
> A private thread ensued between myself, GNU, and Benno, and what came out of
> that conversation was that Benno was not going to be allowed to become a
> maintainer of the project in GNU’s eyes.

This is the part I'm most curious about. Why didn't GNU let him become a
maintainer?

~~~
artlogic
GNU requires contributors (and maintainers) to assign copyright for non-
trivial contributions. Benno doesn't want to do this, thus in GNU's eyes, he
can't be the maintainer.

You can argue (and it has been, to death) whether copyright assignment is
right or wrong. When it comes to GNU projects, it's the rule of law. Based on
mailing list posts and contribution history, it seems like the project had
probably been in questionable GNU territory for awhile, given Benno's strong
role and his unwillingness to assign copyright. I'm curious to see how the GNU
project will respond.

~~~
somethingsimple
Do you know what GNU's rationale is for requiring copyright assignment?

~~~
femto
[https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-
assign.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.en.html)

Because it makes it easier for them, as owner, to deal with copyright
violations.

~~~
GhotiFish
conversely, what's the argument against assigning copyright? I'm pretty sure
the EFF can be trusted to keep nano open source.

~~~
sundarurfriend
> I'm pretty sure the EFF

Do you mean _FSF_ here?

~~~
GhotiFish
oops. yah.

------
brudgers
Related discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11953044](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11953044)

------
noobermin
I personally have a question relevant to this that seems to not have been
answered in the previous discussion ref'd by brudgers: what does GNU stand to
lose in losing Nano? What does Nano stand to lose by losing the GNU moniker?

~~~
catskull
That's a good question to ask. My opinion: nothing, basically, on either side.
You could argue that being an official GNU project gives nano a level of
legitimacy and carries with it an implied quality level. I wonder if nano
would ship by default on basically every *nix distribution without the help of
GNU. Last I checked, it was nano, not emacs that comes preinstalled on an
Ubuntu image.

I think nano helps fulfill the GNU project's original goal of a flexible OS. I
think of emacs and nano as having a similar relationship as wordpad and
notepad. That's a bad comparison, but you could say both tools are valid and
functional for the purposes they were designed for.

As it stands I think nano is better off hosting development on github or the
like. People go to great lengths to install and customize their text editors,
so hard core users will seek out the best nano. What sucks is I would be
surprised if the next version of OSX includes a non GNU nano, thus fragmenting
even further.

This is my 2 cents, and I'm mostly talking through my hat.

~~~
adiabatty
…does nano _have_ hardcore users aside from its own developers?

~~~
59nadir
I think most nano users will end up using the one shipped with their distro,
which means that the choice of fork will mean a lot for usage statistics. No
one is going to go out of their way to install the best nano fork.

With vim/emacs you'll have super opinionated users and they will make sure
that they use whichever is the best/most stable version, but in this case I
really think politics plays a much bigger part.

------
kinkdr
What a dreadful choice of color combination! I cannot even read the comments
here after reading that post.

~~~
krylon
Agreed.

Quick workaround: Firefox has a reader mode (the little book-icon at the right
side of the address field) that renders the main content of a page black-on-
white in a very eye-friendly (read: huge) font size. I used to wonder what
that was for, but these days I come across unreadable or unreadably ugly pages
more often, and I have come to like it.

------
pvaldes
My first editor was ed, then I switched to joe and pico, tried briefly vi and
elvis but they didn't stick, and instead to learn how to do the same in five
small editors I learned emacs. I think that this was a dificult, but very
smart move in retrospective. Learned enought nano to be able to float, after
or maybe at same time than emacs, so their main appeal to me always was that
it was like a micro-emacs available for emergencies, but much easier to
remember than ed. I like and keep using the editor, but to learn "big tricks"
in nano was unnecessary from that point, because the time invested in emacs
eventually started paying benefits.

------
rhabarba
I never understood why nano is so popular. It even breaks line breaks by
default.

~~~
sbuttgereit
I think there is a whole tier of both entry level hobbyists and what I'll call
lower sophistication professionals, sysadmin types that manage small or mid-
sized company IT systems where there are a small handful of low volume Linux
servers (or similar) to deal with: basic configs, basic backups, etc. For
them, I think nano is as close an analog to what they get in a windowed
operating system, while still dealing with the command line.

These aren't the types to go run off and learn vi or Emacs because, at the
level they're playing at, there's not much advantage. They are in the command
line text editor only occasionally for a simple edit here and there. nano is
relatively intuitive, vi and Emacs aren't.

Moreover, I think it may be under appreciated, especially here on HN, just how
many technology professionals are in this category. They know what they know
and get by with it.

EDIT: I should make clear, that "lower sophistication professionals" don't
have anything to be ashamed of nor are they somehow lesser in what's
important; I just don't know how to say it in a way that doesn't have a tinge
of sounding derogatory. It's not intended.

~~~
rhabarba
Wouldn't it make more sense for them to use joe then? joe comes with
preconfigured hotkeys which are more "known" than C-o etc.

~~~
mwpmaybe
joe! My first Unix-y text editor, but it's been vi/vim for 12 or 13 years now.
Anyway, distros stopped including joe out of the box in favor of first pico
and then nano, which is why it's not more popular.

~~~
digi_owl
Yeah, looking at wikipedia it seems joe was without a maintainer from 1995 to
2001. This likely leading to people adopting pico. But as pico was part of the
pine email client, nano was made to be a free standing pico replacement.

Also, i guess pico/nano style key combos more "friendly" than the sequences
joe uses (ctrl-k then another key to do anything).

