3 ms·

Nano is great as an idea - a editor with almost no features which is small, fast and is everywhere. Howerer, it suffers from the same as all open source project

Nano is great as an idea - a editor with almost no features which is small, fast and is everywhere. Howerer, it suffers from the same as all open source projects. Working on it is fun, so they add new feautres with each version. Now 'nano' is not nano anymore. It even has had syntax highlighting for some time already.

zvrba 6y ago
> Now 'nano' is not nano anymore. Nothing beats plain old 'vi' (NOT vim!).
- jedimastert 6y ago
  Can you highlight what differences make you choose vi over vim?
  - Someone 6y ago
    I think the comment is about vi scoring better on “lack of features” than vim, not about preferring vi over vim. Of course, ed beats that, and the combination of cat and echo with redirection beats that (for a very limited definition of ‘editor’)
- marcocampos 6y ago
  Do distros still come with original vi? My understanding is that when you type 'vi' you get a minimal version of vim on most (all?) distros theses days.
  - zvrba 6y ago
    'vi' is still 'vi' in OSX, and I believe the "original" 'vi' is accessible as 'nvi' on the usual Linux distros. (e.g., https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/nvi https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/nvi)
    - fanf2 6y ago
      nvi is new vi, released as part of 4.3BSD-net2. The only place I have encountered original vi is on Solaris. Solaris vi does horrible things like crashing if you maximize your xterm too big...
simias 6y ago
I wasn't even aware that nano could be used as a "real" editor before I read these comments. I always thought it was like notepad.exe, meant for quick edits but not for any serious work. I just discovered that it supports syntax highlighting, multiple buffer support, macros, a file browser and auto-indentation. It's only a matter of time before it gets Python scripting support. I'm sure its great if you like the editor but for something that's called "nano" it definitely reeks of feature creep, actually I just checked that the nano binary on my system is actually bigger than vi. That being said when the most popular code editor these days is an Electron app, I suppose that "nano" is not technically false advertising.

zvrba 6y ago

> Now 'nano' is not nano anymore. Nothing beats plain old 'vi' (NOT vim!).

jedimastert 6y ago
Can you highlight what differences make you choose vi over vim?
- Someone 6y ago
  I think the comment is about vi scoring better on “lack of features” than vim, not about preferring vi over vim. Of course, ed beats that, and the combination of cat and echo with redirection beats that (for a very limited definition of ‘editor’)
marcocampos 6y ago
Do distros still come with original vi? My understanding is that when you type 'vi' you get a minimal version of vim on most (all?) distros theses days.
- zvrba 6y ago
  'vi' is still 'vi' in OSX, and I believe the "original" 'vi' is accessible as 'nvi' on the usual Linux distros. (e.g., https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/nvi https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/nvi)
  - fanf2 6y ago
    nvi is new vi, released as part of 4.3BSD-net2. The only place I have encountered original vi is on Solaris. Solaris vi does horrible things like crashing if you maximize your xterm too big...

simias 6y ago

I wasn't even aware that nano could be used as a "real" editor before I read these comments. I always thought it was like notepad.exe, meant for quick edits but not for any serious work. I just discovered that it supports syntax highlighting, multiple buffer support, macros, a file browser and auto-indentation. It's only a matter of time before it gets Python scripting support. I'm sure its great if you like the editor but for something that's called "nano" it definitely reeks of feature creep, actually I just checked that the nano binary on my system is actually bigger than vi. That being said when the most popular code editor these days is an Electron app, I suppose that "nano" is not technically false advertising.