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The first thing I uninstall on a new system is nano.

felixr 6y ago
+1 to uninstalling nano I get stuck in nano like other people get stuck in vim. I definitely prefer vi as the default editor. But I understand that this does not apply to everyone.
- spanhandler 6y ago
  It has a cheat sheet at the bottom, including how to exit, though? Like maybe there’s some way to disable it with a switch but I’ve never seen nano without it.
  - felixr 6y ago
    I know. The cheat sheet gets me out of it. But I think my problem is that the keys that I press intuitively are the wrong ones and it keeps asking me to press more keys to get out of it :-)
Tepix 6y ago
Agreed. Investing the time to learn to use vi properly will pay off hugely in the long run.
Barrin92 6y ago
I don't uninstall it but I don't really get the love, mostly because of the keybindings. Maybe I'm too young and don't know its legacy but they seem super esoteric to me and I've never seen them anywhere else. Emacs navigation bindings are similar to terminal bindings, and well vi is its own world but at least fairly widespread today.
- einr 6y ago
  nano is a GPL-licensed clone of pico, which in turn was originally conceived as the integrated message editor in PINE, the popular UNIX e-mail client first released in 1989. If you look at the overall interface of PINE you will recognize that it is consistent with pico/nano, but other than that there really wasn't much consistency in terms of keyboard commands between apps in 1989. More importantly, while for instance ^S for "save" might seem more natural than ^O for "writeOut", remember that dumb terminals over slow lines were still very much a thing in 1989 and ^S was already used as a terminal control code for XOFF (software flow control) -- which is why nano throws that "XOFF ignored, mumble mumble" message when it catches ^S.
panpanna 6y ago
I don't uninstall it, it's good to have it around just in case. And removing a base system package _will_ break things. But I always change the default editor to something more emacs-y: export EDITOR=/usr/bin/mg

+1 to uninstalling nano I get stuck in nano like other people get stuck in vim. I definitely prefer vi as the default editor. But I understand that this does not apply to everyone.

spanhandler 6y ago
It has a cheat sheet at the bottom, including how to exit, though? Like maybe there’s some way to disable it with a switch but I’ve never seen nano without it.
- felixr 6y ago
  I know. The cheat sheet gets me out of it. But I think my problem is that the keys that I press intuitively are the wrong ones and it keeps asking me to press more keys to get out of it :-)

Tepix 6y ago

Agreed. Investing the time to learn to use vi properly will pay off hugely in the long run.

Barrin92 6y ago

I don't uninstall it but I don't really get the love, mostly because of the keybindings. Maybe I'm too young and don't know its legacy but they seem super esoteric to me and I've never seen them anywhere else. Emacs navigation bindings are similar to terminal bindings, and well vi is its own world but at least fairly widespread today.

einr 6y ago
nano is a GPL-licensed clone of pico, which in turn was originally conceived as the integrated message editor in PINE, the popular UNIX e-mail client first released in 1989. If you look at the overall interface of PINE you will recognize that it is consistent with pico/nano, but other than that there really wasn't much consistency in terms of keyboard commands between apps in 1989. More importantly, while for instance ^S for "save" might seem more natural than ^O for "writeOut", remember that dumb terminals over slow lines were still very much a thing in 1989 and ^S was already used as a terminal control code for XOFF (software flow control) -- which is why nano throws that "XOFF ignored, mumble mumble" message when it catches ^S.

panpanna 6y ago

I don't uninstall it, it's good to have it around just in case. And removing a base system package _will_ break things. But I always change the default editor to something more emacs-y: export EDITOR=/usr/bin/mg