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I can tell you from experience that it wouldn't take long to learn enough vim to make you look back on that preference and wonder why you didn't learn sooner. I

I can tell you from experience that it wouldn't take long to learn enough vim to make you look back on that preference and wonder why you didn't learn sooner. It's a shame that for many of us our first experience with it involves Googling how to quit out. That and a higher learning curve than most editors put a lot of people off, even after they've become familiar with it.

nurettin 9y ago
I'd praise vim as a 15+year vim user, but people crap on nano without even knowing the shortcuts it provides (cut/paste/move rows, justify a block of text, etc.) which are very useful when remote editing configuration files. Never in my life have I remotely opened a config with nano and thought to myself "oh damn I wish it was vi".
- zimpenfish 9y ago
  > Never in my life have I remotely opened a config with nano and thought to myself "oh damn I wish it was vi". Adding to the pile of anecdata: I wish this every time I forget that our vagrants spin up without `EDITOR` or `VISUAL` configured which means I get nano for my first edit and, frankly, fuck that noise.
empath75 9y ago
I use vim for development. If you need to add a comma you forgot to a json file, nano is faster.
mikegerwitz 9y ago
Many people find themselves in nano for a quick change. They aren't interested in learning keybindings for an editor, especially (in the case of vi/vim) when those keybindings can accidentally clobber a chunk of your configuration file, sometimes without the user noticing. Nano, as other comments have stated, shows the essential keybindings at the bottom of the screen, always. (I've been using vim for over a decade.)
BeetleB 9y ago
>I can tell you from experience that it wouldn't take long to learn enough vim to make you look back on that preference and wonder why you didn't learn sooner. I can tell you from my experience that after spending a fair amount of time to learn vi, I gave up. Not everyone has the same mental models as you do. Having a separate input and beep mode was something my brain never internalized. Using it was always painfully slow as switching modes never became automatic for me.
- brazzledazzle 9y ago
  Fair point. But if it helps you feel any better I gave up several times and just barely got by with editing (very slowly) when I didn't have alternatives. What finally motivated me into overcoming my mental block was regular expressions of all things. When I realized how powerful (despite being flaky and inconsistent) regexes were in the Windows editors I'd tried I couldn't live without them and it didn't take long before I realized how much better vim was than even that.

nurettin 9y ago

I'd praise vim as a 15+year vim user, but people crap on nano without even knowing the shortcuts it provides (cut/paste/move rows, justify a block of text, etc.) which are very useful when remote editing configuration files. Never in my life have I remotely opened a config with nano and thought to myself "oh damn I wish it was vi".

zimpenfish 9y ago
> Never in my life have I remotely opened a config with nano and thought to myself "oh damn I wish it was vi". Adding to the pile of anecdata: I wish this every time I forget that our vagrants spin up without `EDITOR` or `VISUAL` configured which means I get nano for my first edit and, frankly, fuck that noise.

empath75 9y ago

I use vim for development. If you need to add a comma you forgot to a json file, nano is faster.

mikegerwitz 9y ago

Many people find themselves in nano for a quick change. They aren't interested in learning keybindings for an editor, especially (in the case of vi/vim) when those keybindings can accidentally clobber a chunk of your configuration file, sometimes without the user noticing. Nano, as other comments have stated, shows the essential keybindings at the bottom of the screen, always. (I've been using vim for over a decade.)

BeetleB 9y ago

>I can tell you from experience that it wouldn't take long to learn enough vim to make you look back on that preference and wonder why you didn't learn sooner. I can tell you from my experience that after spending a fair amount of time to learn vi, I gave up. Not everyone has the same mental models as you do. Having a separate input and beep mode was something my brain never internalized. Using it was always painfully slow as switching modes never became automatic for me.

brazzledazzle 9y ago
Fair point. But if it helps you feel any better I gave up several times and just barely got by with editing (very slowly) when I didn't have alternatives. What finally motivated me into overcoming my mental block was regular expressions of all things. When I realized how powerful (despite being flaky and inconsistent) regexes were in the Windows editors I'd tried I couldn't live without them and it didn't take long before I realized how much better vim was than even that.