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Nano to remain in GNU
- Bino 10y agoFair question: how does it matter?
- Esau 10y agoI assume: in that GNU will continue to provide hosting and mailing list resources.
- hannob 10y agoCan anyone give some context info? Was there some conflict between GNU and nano that has now been resolved? What was it about?
- wongarsu 10y agoNano's new maintainer (Benno) didn't like GNU's maintainer agreement and refused to assign copyright of his contributions to the FSF. So instead he forked the project to maintain it ouside of GNU. HN discussion from two months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11953044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11953044
- Ianvdl 10y agoSome additional background - Why the FSF gets copyright assignments from contributors: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.en.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.en.html
- wongarsu 10y agotl;dr: for GPL enforcement.
- davidgerard 10y agoWhich has been mostly okay with widely-distributed ownership, but was a problem in Christoph Hellwig's case against VMware recently. So there's an actual problem of enforceability, versus the project-hampering PITA factor of CLAs at all, e.g. https://lwn.net/Articles/443989/ https://lwn.net/Articles/443989/ It's a seriously tricky balance issue.
- a3n 10y agoAs mentioned in the post, it was about differences over copyright assignment, which has apparently been resolved. The wikipedia page says slightly more about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_nano https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_nano
- unsignedqword 10y agoWhy was it at risk of leaving?
- Ianvdl 10y agoThe previous HN discussion for some context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11953044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11953044
- niftich 10y agoContext: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11953044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11953044 See also, if you have time to read: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/4p9n7e/as_of_nano_260_its_no_longer_a_gnu_project/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/4p9n7e/as_of_nano_26...
- rahiel 10y agoHappy to see the conflict settled! Here's what's in the news entry for the GNU release: With this release we return to GNU. For just a little while we dreamt we were tigers. But we are back in the herd, back to a healthy diet of fresh green free grass.
- aphextron 10y agoedit: not constructive
- hansjorg 10y agoIt's a substitute for pico, not vim.
- henvic 10y agoI used it back a while when I was too lazy to use vim. Now I don't know how to use it anymore rofl
- effie 10y agoI do, and I do not consider it a vim substitution, it's rather a light-weight console-mode editor that is installed on most systems and easy to use.
- michaelsbradley 10y agoThere's also GNU moe! https://www.gnu.org/software/moe/ https://www.gnu.org/software/moe/
- tln 10y agoJOE clone?!? I wonder what motivated `moe`.. and when... joe has been a great option for a terminal editor forever
- isxek 10y agoI'm guessing because there was a period of time where joe's maintainer worked on something else besides joe, and it looked like the project got abandoned already.
- amk_ 10y agoGood to hear. Nano's up-front display of the core key combinations has been a source of relief for people getting dropped into a terminal editor for ages. Wish more distributions would set nano as the default $EDITOR instead of vim.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoOh my god yes. nano, moe, and JOE are more lightweight than vim, and have better ergonomics. I can understand setting $EDITOR to nvi, mg, or similar, but setting it to vim is ridiculous: Vim is in Emacs's weight class.
- amk_ 10y agoThe worst is when someone who's never used Vi before gets thrown in there after running, eg, 'git commit'. Can't Google how to quit because they don't even know the name of the program!
- aristidb 10y agoGoogle actually quickly directs you to the needed information: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9171356/how-do-i-exit-from-the-text-window-in-git http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9171356/how-do-i-exit-fro... (first result for "quit git editor" for me)
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoThis is good news: It's also good to actually see RMS actually compromising. Also, nano is actually a useful tool, despite its reputation as the editor for those who don't know what they're doing. It's an excellent editor for quick edits that aren't worth pulling up emacs for. Although I would never reccomend it for Real Work, that's not really its intent. And it owns its field, having crushed all competition save vi, which is really in its own class. Also, nano is frankly a lot more powerful than a lot of people give it credit for: It's just not programmable, which is a necessity in editors these days.
- 2bitencryption 10y agoIn a way, maybe it's good it's not programmable. This ensures that on any machine or environment you see Nano, you can expect it to behave exactly the same. If you want something super customizable you can just use vi(m) or emacs. Nano is like Windows Notepad but for the CLI. It does one thing one thing only, no matter where you are.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoI understand why nano was designed that way, but it does mean it's unsuitable for Real Work. It works well for light text editing, which, let's face it, is probably the most commonplace activity on a given unix system.
- cgm616 10y agoThis is exactly what I use it for. When I'm ssh'd into a server without my vim config, I prefer to use nano simply because I'm so used to my own vim. Using any other vim config is actually difficult, especially since I'm not actually that knowledgable about vim. Nano takes the cake in this situation. It's everywhere, it's easy.
- belorn 10y agoI would assume that the compromise in this case that some developers of nano will do copyright assignment while others won't, and FSF will still do GPL enforcement. The previous dispute as I understand it is that FSF has a all or nothing approach to copyright assignment. Either a GNU project assign all copyright, or a GNU project assign nothing and FSF do not enforce the projects license.
- AstroJetson 10y agoIt's a great editor, I use it all the time with new Raspberry Pi people. Since it's so simple to use we can focus on what we are doing vs learning on how to drive an editor. Happy to see RMS was willing to compromise and keep nano in the hurd.
- 4ad 10y agoAnybody else use ed(1)? My main editor is acme, and when I need to do large edit jobs on remote servers I control I use sam. However, when I have to edit files on servers I don't control, or when I have to do a quick edit job and I don't have a sam terminal started yet, I use ed. Unlike all other editors, ed doesn't erase the screen. I find this extremely useful. Also, ed is always the same. Vi is not always the same on different systems. Sometimes it has syntax syntax highlighting by default, forcing me to make effort to turn it off, sometimes nocompatible is set on or off, etc. Ed is always the same and has no settings. Sometimes inside my acme session I run win(1), and sometimes in my win sessions I ssh to some system and run ed inside acme. I forced myself to use ed exclusively for a week some years back, and since then I stuck with it.
- james2vegas 10y agoex is usually safe from the featuritis that grips vim
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoYeah, that's the problem with poor scriptability, mixed with no dedication to minimalism or vision. This minimalism is one nice thing about vi, although I like my editors like I like my paper: scriptable.
- joeyo 10y agoMy attempts at using ed end up like the session illustrated here: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.txt https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.txt
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoAhh. Yes. I'm not that bad, but I'm not great either.
- SturgeonsLaw 10y ago> Ed, the greatest WYGIWYG editor of all It's not often I can type lol and literally mean it, but this is one of those times.. lol :D
- pcunite 10y agoI was always a fan of mcedit.
- mrmondo 10y agoTo be honest, I didn't realise that nano was being maintained, I sort of assumed that it was slowly fading out of existence. Honest question: does anyone here use nano for anything? If so - what are you reasons for using it / what do you like about it?
- kalleboo 10y agoThe times I need to edit a text file in a terminal are very rare (config is managed, code comes from git). I already have a GUI text editor of choice, so I've never felt any need to memorise vi/emacs (aside from how to save and exit). nano has the commands right there onscreen if I've forgotten.
- mrmondo 10y agoah yes, interesting, thank you for replying!
- niftich 10y agoNano lists its shortcuts in the window, like most modern GUI software. This is helpful for beginners, but also for me when I haven't had my morning coffee and suddenly find myself in a text editor. I enjoy using it, but I also like that it's discoverable from within the program; that strikes me as good design.
- mrmondo 10y agoOK interesting, for me I personally always feel lost in nano as for me it feels like it's a gui app trying to exist in a console, but that's me - thanks for replying to my question!
- niftich 10y agoFWIW any application launched from the shell that spawns its own full-screen context is a 'gui app trying to exist in a console', including its competitor editors; at least nano tells you now to use it once you're stuck inside it.