I'm a Linux/Unix "devop" since 15 years and I still use nano every day or second. It's the default $EDITOR in Debian and derivates and at some machines I did not consequently set EDITOR=vim.
Congratulations to the developers of nano. It's a timeless modern terminal editor which can be operated by novices as well as experts.
However, I can imagine many scenarios when this fails if the target machine has a very different software version setup (and older different Linux distribution, for instance). Would require some fine tuning of parameters, but sounds promising!
What you forgot to mention was that you also banned me from replying for an extended period effectively silencing my voice. I’ll let the readers decide where that kind of behavior lies politically.
I moved to micro[0] editor a while ago. It saves me a couple of seconds every time I need to edit something in /etc/* (especially when copy-pasting some text sections in the middle of the file). But it is not adopted by all distributions yet.
Yep, micro is nice, much more common bindings (provided you didn't grow in emacs, vim, pico, etc.) However it doesn't work very well under tmux (ne has the same problem).
Looks like a cool alternative to nano, but if it isn't included by default on everything (like nano) I don't see why I would use this over Vim or Emacs.
I have to give myself a kick in the pants at my own irrationality. For some weird reason, I use vim. I'm not very good at it, and I only use it for basic things like editing configuration files. Every time I use nano, I prefer it, but somehow just am in a habit/rut of typing vi blah. And I call it irrational because vim is totally non-obvious and not self-describing how do the most basic tasks, and yet I keep hitting my head on a wall. Maybe I should remove vim, install nano, and make vi an alias of nano!
Recently made this argument to someone. They open vi/m just to immediately jump into insert mode and never leave.
I love using vim and would encourage anyone to go through vimtutor and start learning it, but if you're just not interested, using nano can save you a lot of headache.
Part of the problem is that vi is pretty much guaranteed to be on any system you log into, including many 'embedded' systems. So although I was historically an emacs user, I have learned the minimum of vi commands to get by, but no better than that.
Thanks for mentioning this. I also started teaching my 3 kids using a terminal and nano instead of a gui editor. Consequently they are 15, 17, 20 and all are very comfortable in a terminal environment.
It feels amazing that my 17 year old daughter uses sed, awk, grep, cat, nano, etc instead of GUI apps.
Nice. I think the best way to learn how to use programming tools is to actually see the need for them yourself. Starting with a basic text editor, no make, no debugger etc. is great.
With the widespread availability of raster graphics, I wonder how often people actually have to use a character-cell terminal for editing text. (I appreciate the coolness factor.)
I use a terminal text editor when I'm doing something in the terminal, need to do a quick edit and don't want to have to switch away from the terminal into a GUI editor. For me that's typically commit messages and not-too-complex config files. In such cases using a terminal editor is simply more convenient...
That's a nice alternative. Never thought of that. On most machines I have mc already installed so it's a real package installable alternative (unlike micro).
Alternatives as in "easy-to-use no-hassles console editor"? JOE brings more features and it even comes with a nano (actually pico) mode accessible with the jpico command. Ne comes with macros and it uses standard keybindings (C-s,c,v,z...). Both predate nano and are the repos of most distros.
Congratulations to the developers of nano. It's a timeless modern terminal editor which can be operated by novices as well as experts.