6 ms·
Here is the reasoning: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/UseNanoByDefault https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/UseNanoByDefault "By default, git picks
by Jonnax 6y ago
Here is the reasoning:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/UseNanoByDefault https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/UseNanoByDefault
"By default, git picks vi. You need to spend time learning how to use it, for even basic editing tasks. This increases the barrier to entry for those who are switching to Fedora and don't know how to use vi. It also makes things hard for those who don't particularly want to learn how to use vi. (These arguments would apply just as well if git picked Vim. vi is like hard mode for Vim, with fewer features, missing syntax highlighting, and no indication of what mode you are in. Even Vim users may feel lost and bewildered when using vi.)"
Honestly I didn't know that vi and vi were different.
I've used Linux for years.
I just learnt how to enter insert mode and write and quit.
These are the most uninutive applications I've ever used.
It's like people people reminiscing about how good the word 2003 interface was. But on another level.
Where you have to read the manual to change a letter in a file.
The fact that this change happened today and not 10 years ago just highlights the strange elitism you see for hard to use interfaces.
- Akronymus 6y agoIn my personal experience, if you want to spend the time learning it, vi/vim is faster than nano. But for the VAST majority of people it is simply not desirable/worth learning vi/vim. Just learning the basics makes it usable but you will NOT see any benefits of vim over, let's say, nano. (Also vi should almost never be the default over vim)
- dijit 6y agovi being the default is not elitism or sadism; it is two decisions coming to confluence: 1) POSIX requires vi. Merely the act of requiring it means that it’s a sunk cost on every OS installation. 2) vim is large(r). If you’re optimising for small installation sizes in order for the user to be able to choose their own adventure (as it were) then vi being the default makes sense from a pragmatic point of view. They can’t remove vi without breaking POSIX, so I welcome the change, there’s a lot of developers I know who are fearful of the Linux command line because of things like vi.
- joosters 6y agoThis argument seems fairly unconvincing. If your chosen optimisation is size, you probably don't care so much about being 100% POSIX-compliant, which means you can leave out even more stuff and save room. At which point, EDITOR might as well be 'ed' !
- dijit 6y agoI'm having a hard time understanding what you mean. If the goal is 'minimal viable distro that is posix compliant' then vi becomes a very 'safe' default. I wouldn't say that Fedora aims to be 'as small as possible', just a 'minimum viable distro', and optimising for size is something that is the most obvious stated aim of having a 'Minimal' version of anything.
- barrkel 6y agoAmusingly, both nano and mg (micro Emacs clone) executables are smaller than nvi, which is probably the version of vi you'll end up with if you're optimizing for size and not going full busybox. vim-tiny is like 5x bigger again, because you're getting the full vim executable.
- dijit 6y agoThe point is that you're including it already for POSIX compliance. For much the same reason Teams is eating slacks lunch: if the 'cost' is included for other reasons then it's a safe default because it wont cost _more_.
- barrkel 6y agoSure. But if you're building a system down to a size, you're probably not that concerned about POSIX compliance, because mere POSIX compliance isn't enough beyond the most rudimentary of software. And if you're running something statically linked with minimal dependencies, it almost certainly requires a lot less than all things POSIX, so you can cut even further. My point was on size, not POSIX compliance. I just found the actual sizes amusing.
- colechristensen 6y agoThe “anti-elitism” of never wanting to use anything that isn’t obvious is problematic too. There exist plenty of things which have steep learning curves which are very useful, they wouldn’t be better if their target becomes people who won’t spend five minutes learning basics. Complexity shaming isn’t something to be proud of.
- boomboomsubban 6y agoMany users first encounter with vi is through the process of learning to edit various system files. They are already on a path with a somewhat steep learning curve, and are suddenly facing a completely unrelated one with no guidance on how to proceed. Steep learning curves are fine, but people should be able to choose whether they would benefit from them and when they should start the process.
- jaekash 6y agoThey can, by changing their editor.
- boomboomsubban 6y agoEven if they were wise enough to change that ahead of time, they then run "visudo" and are stuck.
- jaekash 6y agoI guess if you don't want to run visudo ... well, I mean there is really only one solution, don't run it. I never run it and I am still breathing.
- Jonnax 6y agoMaybe you don't know what it is. But it's a utility to edit the sudoers file with validation that prevents you from saving a broken file. If the file is broken, you cannot use sudo. visudo on the latest Ubuntu defaults to nano.
- zozbot234 6y agoYou think `vi` is unintuitive? Clearly you've never used `ed` on a hard-print teletype. Compared to that, vi is super easy!
- rbanffy 6y agoYou should try to edit toggling bits in the front panel. Next to that, ed is ridiculously easy. I was going to say using a card punch, but that's actually easier than ed. Even a manual one is better.
- bachmeier 6y ago> The fact that this change happened today and not 10 years ago just highlights the strange elitism you see for hard to use interfaces. Even for someone that has used Emacs for decades, having vi as the default for Git is, at the very least, an annoyance. I don't think it's elitism. It's just a decision that was a good idea in the 1970s that was never updated.
- bayindirh 6y agovi and emacs are strange pieces of software which were built in a different era for different (more knowledgeable) people. Nano is a nice little editor with its own quirks and I love all of them. However, vi is something beyond powerful. Even if you give the littlest of effort to learn its inner powers, it pays dividends in a rather handsome way. I know very little vi but, even with it I can save tremendous amount of work which can be also done with grep, sed, awk and its friends. Open a file, write something seemingly gibberish and magic happens. ... and that makes me happy and saves me a lot of time. Everybody can say vi and emacs are hard and unnecessarily complex for a beginner (and I can buy them countless rounds of beers) but, calling people who defend/like vi as elitist is a little harsh.
- xtiansimon 6y ago> "Even if you give the littlest of effort to learn its inner powers, it pays dividends in a rather handsome way." Which sort of mirrors the learning curve for Linux, and Git. Which makes the decision poetically significant, if not particularly meaningful from a rational learning standpoint.
- bayindirh 6y agoI personally find modern Linux and git easier to grasp and discover compared to vi/vim/emacs. Help prompts, user interfaces and capabilities of GUI tools have increased tremendously over the last decade in the Linux realm. However, vi (because of its nature) stayed almost the same. Even in 2020, I need to dig a lot of resources and keep my own notes to do anything complex in vi(m). This is not the same for rest of a Linux installation.
- swiley 6y agoThe reason vim is accepted despite being unintuitive is because you spend all your time in it. There are always tradeoffs between intuitive UIs and UIs that are efficient and ergonomic when they’re fully understood. Vim leans more toward the latter with the expectation that you’ll learn most of the features after years of using it.
- sebazzz 6y agoThe advantage of vi/vim is that it works when connected through a system via a serial port or (possibly) telnet. Nano requires more control over the terminal, via SSH for instance.