4 ms·

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

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.

joshschreuder 10y ago
I fall into this category, I run a HTPC off Lubuntu for performance reasons and because I like to tinker in different technologies, but do dev on Windows in my day to day, and never bothered to learn Vim / Emacs. I stick to Sublime on Windows, and when I need to tinker on my HTPC, I jump into nano, mainly because the command is memorable and the editor is very easy to use.
rhabarba 10y ago
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.
- sbuttgereit 10y ago
  Never heard of it. That same audience is also likely not choosing their editor much of the time. I've found that nano is the default editor often and if it's good enough, why would you mess with it? I know when I search for something that is not a core interest of mine, I go with the first thing that Google shows me that meets my requirements.... I don't overthink that which is mostly unimportant to me.
- mwpmaybe 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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).
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Damn, i haven't touched it in years. But apparently i had it still installed. And best i can tell nano happened because pico was popular but was part of the pine email client. Also, from what i can gather joe was left unmaintained for a number of years, likely leading to people picking up pico, and then nano, as an alternative.
JonathonW 10y ago
I'm a professional software developer, working in a mix of Windows, OSX, and Linux, and nano's still my go-to text-mode editor. Nano's got simple, easy-to-remember keyboard shortcuts, it's modeless, and it's more than powerful enough for the tasks I'm typically doing at the command line (editing git commit messages, light editing of config files, etc.). When I need more features, I'd rather be in a GUI editor: Sublime or Atom for plain text editing, and the JetBrains IDEs or Visual Studio for projects where we're using a full IDE. I've yet to find anything in my workflow that would make it worth the time and effort to learn emacs or vim, beyond the basics needed to get around just in case one of them is the only thing available (coughGit for Windowscough).
godzillabrennus 10y ago
I agree that coming from a Windows world I found there are many reasons to love Nano. It's easy to pickup and use plus it is rock solid even when working in large files. That said, I noticed you labeled folks who use it "lower sophistication professionals". I don't think it's fair to label anyone who works with different technologies than you as such. They may work in a different part of the industry than you but that hardly makes them "less sophisticated". Maybe you find their tasks less challenging/exciting than the ones you work on but in all fairness they may find your tasks less challenging/exciting than the ones they work on. After all Zuckerberg was at Harvard as a psychology major, Andrew Mason has a degree in Music, Tim Westergren from Pandora has a degree in political science and they are all examples of people who don't fit the uber nerd Steve Wozniak like programmer mold. There is hardly a reason to call people that build companies of that size "lower sophisticated professionals" yet they likely can't navigate emacs like you can.
- sbuttgereit 10y ago
  I clarified my point as you were commenting. While the my label is accurate: you'd never hire these people to run large, complex, high volume infrastructure, it's not a value judgment on them.
  - slyall 10y ago
    So you'd never hire these people based on what editor they used but it's not a value judgement or you being derogatory.. That really doesn't come across well.
    - sbuttgereit 10y ago
      >.< I've learned that in forums such as this, there is always someone to pick nits, drop context, read too literally, or otherwise not see the forest for the trees. I've also learned not to worry about it. Enjoy the rest of your day.
rahimnathwani 10y ago
I'm a Product Manager (and have, in the past, been a sysadmin) and I fall into that camp. I prefer to use a GUI text editor, but use nano when I'm in a shell. I have an emacs book on my shelf, and intend one day to learn emacs, but due to the nature of my work and spare time activities, I don't spend enough time in a text editor. It seems like it would take quite some before I was more efficient in emacs than I am with nano and a grep. I started using nano (although I think I'd type pico to invoke it?) back when I used pine as my only email client. It has the same shortcuts as pine IIRC, so was easy to pick up.
- sbuttgereit 10y ago
  For much of my career I was in the same camp you're in. I did field tech, sysadmin (Windows), and then went the IT management route for a long time. Early on I did pick up some vi, but only because in my field tech days I was working on small doctor office billing systems: single servers usually running Xenix(!) or SCO OpenServer(!) and vi was the only editor available: to this day I can reliably get into insert mode, save the file, and exit vi and no more without looking it up. Emacs I had the same breadth of skills until about a month ago. I always used a GUI text editor of some sort, though sometime specialized. In more recent years, I've oddly enough become much more directly involved in software development. I live in Sublime Text and occasionally an IDE... Eclipse, Netbeans... QT Creator a fair amount. But I've been learning Emacs: I need to write estimates and, depending on the engagement, track time and such. I've found that, of all the online services and other software I have, the best tool to get things done was Emacs & org-mode with some fairly extensive config to customize the org-mode behavior; I even got Gnus up and running. I couldn't use it for coding because about 75% of what I do is database development (PostgreSQL schema stuff, PL/pgSQL) and I couldn't get the damn indentation behavior behaved so now I'm in both: Sublime Text for development and Emacs for organization.
eggy 10y ago
I have used Vim, and I still use Emacs (Spacemacs), but a lot of the time, I just start up nano or leave it running for quick edits. I find I am in nano several times, and only sit with Emacs for coding because I don't like to leave Emacs running in the same way I can with nano.

joshschreuder 10y ago

I fall into this category, I run a HTPC off Lubuntu for performance reasons and because I like to tinker in different technologies, but do dev on Windows in my day to day, and never bothered to learn Vim / Emacs. I stick to Sublime on Windows, and when I need to tinker on my HTPC, I jump into nano, mainly because the command is memorable and the editor is very easy to use.

rhabarba 10y ago

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.

sbuttgereit 10y ago
Never heard of it. That same audience is also likely not choosing their editor much of the time. I've found that nano is the default editor often and if it's good enough, why would you mess with it? I know when I search for something that is not a core interest of mine, I go with the first thing that Google shows me that meets my requirements.... I don't overthink that which is mostly unimportant to me.
mwpmaybe 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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).
digi_owl 10y ago
Damn, i haven't touched it in years. But apparently i had it still installed. And best i can tell nano happened because pico was popular but was part of the pine email client. Also, from what i can gather joe was left unmaintained for a number of years, likely leading to people picking up pico, and then nano, as an alternative.

JonathonW 10y ago

I'm a professional software developer, working in a mix of Windows, OSX, and Linux, and nano's still my go-to text-mode editor. Nano's got simple, easy-to-remember keyboard shortcuts, it's modeless, and it's more than powerful enough for the tasks I'm typically doing at the command line (editing git commit messages, light editing of config files, etc.). When I need more features, I'd rather be in a GUI editor: Sublime or Atom for plain text editing, and the JetBrains IDEs or Visual Studio for projects where we're using a full IDE. I've yet to find anything in my workflow that would make it worth the time and effort to learn emacs or vim, beyond the basics needed to get around just in case one of them is the only thing available (coughGit for Windowscough).

godzillabrennus 10y ago

I agree that coming from a Windows world I found there are many reasons to love Nano. It's easy to pickup and use plus it is rock solid even when working in large files. That said, I noticed you labeled folks who use it "lower sophistication professionals". I don't think it's fair to label anyone who works with different technologies than you as such. They may work in a different part of the industry than you but that hardly makes them "less sophisticated". Maybe you find their tasks less challenging/exciting than the ones you work on but in all fairness they may find your tasks less challenging/exciting than the ones they work on. After all Zuckerberg was at Harvard as a psychology major, Andrew Mason has a degree in Music, Tim Westergren from Pandora has a degree in political science and they are all examples of people who don't fit the uber nerd Steve Wozniak like programmer mold. There is hardly a reason to call people that build companies of that size "lower sophisticated professionals" yet they likely can't navigate emacs like you can.

sbuttgereit 10y ago
I clarified my point as you were commenting. While the my label is accurate: you'd never hire these people to run large, complex, high volume infrastructure, it's not a value judgment on them.
- slyall 10y ago
  So you'd never hire these people based on what editor they used but it's not a value judgement or you being derogatory.. That really doesn't come across well.
  - sbuttgereit 10y ago
    >.< I've learned that in forums such as this, there is always someone to pick nits, drop context, read too literally, or otherwise not see the forest for the trees. I've also learned not to worry about it. Enjoy the rest of your day.

rahimnathwani 10y ago

I'm a Product Manager (and have, in the past, been a sysadmin) and I fall into that camp. I prefer to use a GUI text editor, but use nano when I'm in a shell. I have an emacs book on my shelf, and intend one day to learn emacs, but due to the nature of my work and spare time activities, I don't spend enough time in a text editor. It seems like it would take quite some before I was more efficient in emacs than I am with nano and a grep. I started using nano (although I think I'd type pico to invoke it?) back when I used pine as my only email client. It has the same shortcuts as pine IIRC, so was easy to pick up.

sbuttgereit 10y ago
For much of my career I was in the same camp you're in. I did field tech, sysadmin (Windows), and then went the IT management route for a long time. Early on I did pick up some vi, but only because in my field tech days I was working on small doctor office billing systems: single servers usually running Xenix(!) or SCO OpenServer(!) and vi was the only editor available: to this day I can reliably get into insert mode, save the file, and exit vi and no more without looking it up. Emacs I had the same breadth of skills until about a month ago. I always used a GUI text editor of some sort, though sometime specialized. In more recent years, I've oddly enough become much more directly involved in software development. I live in Sublime Text and occasionally an IDE... Eclipse, Netbeans... QT Creator a fair amount. But I've been learning Emacs: I need to write estimates and, depending on the engagement, track time and such. I've found that, of all the online services and other software I have, the best tool to get things done was Emacs & org-mode with some fairly extensive config to customize the org-mode behavior; I even got Gnus up and running. I couldn't use it for coding because about 75% of what I do is database development (PostgreSQL schema stuff, PL/pgSQL) and I couldn't get the damn indentation behavior behaved so now I'm in both: Sublime Text for development and Emacs for organization.

eggy 10y ago

I have used Vim, and I still use Emacs (Spacemacs), but a lot of the time, I just start up nano or leave it running for quick edits. I find I am in nano several times, and only sit with Emacs for coding because I don't like to leave Emacs running in the same way I can with nano.