3 ms·

In 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

In 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 ago
vi 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 ago
  This 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 ago
    I'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 ago
  Amusingly, 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 ago
    The 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 ago
      Sure. 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.
      - rbanffy 6y ago
        Is POSIX compliance still a major selling point? Is it still mandated by regulations?
        dijit 6y ago
        it doesn't matter if it's mandated or not. If you write a POSIX compliant shell script then that expresses its portability. You can argue merits or demerits of POSIX as a system, but there needs to be some common base regardless, otherwise it's the wild west.

dijit 6y ago

vi 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 ago
This 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 ago
  I'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 ago
Amusingly, 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 ago
  The 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 ago
    Sure. 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.
    - rbanffy 6y ago
      Is POSIX compliance still a major selling point? Is it still mandated by regulations?
      - dijit 6y ago
        it doesn't matter if it's mandated or not. If you write a POSIX compliant shell script then that expresses its portability. You can argue merits or demerits of POSIX as a system, but there needs to be some common base regardless, otherwise it's the wild west.