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There was a time (2006?) when I was getting into linux. I was a big microsofty, due to comfort mostly, and I was shamed into trying Linux. Like most people I

by dijit 4y ago

There was a time (2006?) when I was getting into linux. I was a big microsofty, due to comfort mostly, and I was shamed into trying Linux. Like most people I went Ubuntu first, but wifi drivers at the time were lacking, and nvidia of yore was certainly not better than nvidia of now. Suffice it to say: I spent a lot of time in the terminal trying to fix things. Nano was my tool of choice because: honestly the initial learning curve of linux and a modal text editor was far too much. that said: when I was later shamed into using vi/vim instead of nano.. after my initial hesitation (and a few rounds on vimtutor) I was as confident as I was on nano... what's more, I was "unlocked" and started learning new and faster ways to move. Being able to replay my last action with "." was nice, and lead me to learn even more native movements. My watershed moment came when I had to delete a leading series of characters in a file of I think 500 lines.. Not enough to say it's impossible but a real chore. Nano would not help me in such a situation: but vim did it with no complaints; all I needed to know was the incantation. I feel like nano shipping as the default editor is a step-back. We have a less powerful tool because we want to attract newbies, but it's the same mistake microsoft makes; When I was into microsoft tooling I had no idea how handicapped I was, the learning curve always had a stop point: everything beyond it was impossible. I will always be thankful I learned linux in a time where the hand-rails were starting to come up, but that we still used powerful and expressive tools instead of being jailed to the opaque and inflexible systems that have come to dominate for the sake of convenience.

nkozyra 4y ago
> I feel like nano shipping as the default editor is a step-back. We have a less powerful tool because we want to attract newbies Perhaps, but your experience sounds like a good blueprint for what new terminal users might want. Start with nano move to more powerful tools when you need them.
- radicalbyte 4y ago
  Windows ships with Notepad, which is fine for 99.9% of users. Those who need more know how to install Notepad++, UltraEdit or Sublime.
- dijit 4y ago
  my concern would be that I dont think people would reach for the more powerful tools; since they arent being pressured into learning them and its impossible to articulate the power you would get until you have it. I was extremely resistant to learn new things when I thought my current way of working was perfectly fine. It’s only retrospectively that I realise how limited I was.
  - kergonath 4y ago
    > I was extremely resistant to learn new things when I thought my current way of working was perfectly fine. It’s not the OS’ job to lecture users about their tools of choice. The Web is full of “vim is the dog’s bollocks” articles, if anyone has a modicum of interest to look at more complex tools. Now, we have to just set EDITOR in the dotfiles for each new student we get starting their MSc project. They have 6 months to do quantum chemistry stuff, not winning flame wars about whose editor is best. And they have already a lot of inane idiosyncrasies to learn in R and the usual Python libraries.
  - kapep 4y ago
    It's also hard to articulate power if the people have no need for that power. People stay with nano because it's intuitive and good enough at editing some config files. What else would someone learning Linux even do with a text editor? I've tried to get into vi and emacs but I honestly never found a good use case for them, even as a developer. When I edit files, the changes are usually very small and I spent most time thinking about what to change. The time it takes to execute that change is negligible. If I need to process large files, those are usually in some kind format that can be manipulated with other tools much more easily. And when it comes to programming, modern IDEs are far superior. I don't doubt that you can be very productive with these editors but the "it's more powerful" argument always seems to mean "look how I fast I can manipulate large unstructured text files with some keyboard shortcuts magic", which is irrelevant to me.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- benj111 4y ago
  If someone asked you what drill they should buy having never used a drill before, not knowing what theyre going to use it for, but probably 'hanging pictures and stuff'. Would you suggest a top of the line SDS Max drill, or would you suggest some bog standard inexpensive drill that does the basics? less powerful doesn't mean worse if you aren't using the features. It just makes it harder to use.
torben-friis 4y ago
Something that annoys me is that the only good thing about vim is the idea of composable modal actions. Don't get me wrong, that feature alone is powerful enough to choose vim as your editor of choice, but... There is no reason whatsoever why you couldn't have an editor with 2022's standards of UX and newbie friendliness that makes use of the same idea; it just hasn't happened. Even when modern editors adapt vim functionality as a plugin, they just replicate the original design choices. Esc to escape insertion mode is clearly a stupid choice in a modern keyboard setup, but we keep it as a default; we just haven't moved past the original decision. Has anyone heard of a (serious / developed) effort to create such a product?
- thanatropism 4y ago
  It's janky, but does lapce fit your bill?
  - torben-friis 4y ago
    I just took a look and the docs only say there’s “vim like modal editing”. Given there’s no more info I guess it’s just vim mode? There doesn’t seem to be an effort to redesign it at least.
- Panzer04 4y ago
  I guess vim keybinds are so ubiquitous it’s probably more valuable to stick with them. If you are truly offended by a particular choice, you can always change them.
- RMPR 4y ago
  > Has anyone heard of a (serious / developed) effort to create such a product? The closest I can think of is Helix. > Esc to escape insertion mode is clearly a stupid choice in a modern keyboard setup, but we keep it as a default; we just haven't moved past the original decision. Nitpicking a bit, but you can also escape insert mode with Ctrl+[ and alt+any normal mode keybinding. I tend to use alt+h/j/k/l but nothing prevents you from doing for e.g. alt+u to escape insert mode while undoing the previous action.
deaddodo 4y ago
> I feel like nano shipping as the default editor is a step-back. I’ve never used a distribution that includes nano, but not also some variety of vi and/or emacs. And there’s no “favorite”/“default” binding in terminal. There are defaults in the GUI, however those are almost exclusively Kate or gEdit. And new users probably use those far more frequently as their first editor. The only qualifier I can figure for nano being a default is the number of tutorials/guides that use it.
- ketzu 4y ago
  > And there’s no “favorite”/“default” binding in terminal. There is. There is the EDITOR environment variable and the alternatives editor. They will be used when a program triggers an interaction that uses a text editor (e.g., mutt, git and more) instead of manually opening an editor yourself. There are also distributions that only ship with a minimal set of editors, forcing you to install different ones. This might also be considered a "default" editor by lots of people. edit: if you consider a "default binding" only one for manually opening a text file, then you are right, but I don't think that is what people talk about when referencing a "default text editor"
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dijit 4y ago
  visudo opens nano on most distributions (ubuntu, debian) despite the name being visudo. whatever the root users $EDITOR variable is set to (and any subsequent created user) is the default. vi/vim wasn't even installed last time I installed ubuntu minimal: but nano was.
Puts 4y ago
> Nano would not help me in such a situation: but vim did it with no complaints; all I needed to know was the incantation. Nano can do regexp search and replace. I think the problem with nano is the menu in the bottom because it makes people think that it's the only things it can do when in fact it's really powerful.
numpad0 4y ago
Couple weeks ago I learned hard way that : key just don’t work in certain combination of host locale and VNC client and client locale. C-c didn’t work, Ctrl+Alt+F2 didn’t work, ssh didn’t work because sshd is not up yet, even VM power cycling button was stuck and didn’t work. Maybe a custom VNC client could have worked. I think I ended up rebooting the host once, just to get out of vi. Second time I just changed locales. nano by default is good.
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  ZZ would probably have worked for you for quitting (seems to work in plain vi as well as the vims)
  - numpad0 4y ago
    This seems a frequent enough issue, that searching "centos can't type colon" in my language yield bunch of SEO blogspams recommending `Shift+11` and `Shift+ZZ`. But neither of which worked in my case; I think Shift+1 was bugged and the file wasn't writable.
forgotpwd16 4y ago
>Nano would not help me in such a situation You could regexp replace all '^[a-z]{4}' (or whatever) with ''. Alternatively you could select area and execute '|sed <whatever>' or '|cut <whatever>'. Advantage: you use the tools you're already familiar with.
alkonaut 4y ago
I guess it depends on how you use the system. I have no intention of ever using a Linux as my “main” system. I’m always a visitor on a strange foreign system. I hold my nose, go in, do whatever dirty deed must be done to get it working again. Usually it’s in some docker image, or an old pi used in my closet, maybe a router, or a cloud vm. But regardless it’s never “home”. I don’t have a personal user, I don’t have a home directory with my own config files. My user is “pi” or “root” or something to that effect. I have been logged in there before, but each time I need to find my way around from scratch. All I need to do is edit some files and get the hell out. And nano is just perfect for it. Perhaps the worst use of vi-as-a-default is in Cygwin (used to run git on windows by some people still) where vi is popped up to let windows users fill in a git commit message. Fantastic UX. I don’t blame Cygwin for it, but git-for-windows could ship with a different default (even notepad would have been better).
- Yizahi 4y ago
  Exactly this. That's why I often read comments like "just install zsh it's so good", or "I have this vim config with plugins and everything works as I expect" and have to react - "ok, good for you, but I have to use fresh installs of linux exclusively, often embedded, and I just pray it's not a busybox, so only defaults for me forever". Learning vim to edit a few lines a week on some remote host, because they didn't bother to include nano is ugh... Bad.
  - dijit 4y ago
    honestly, I think you’re right. one of the things I failed to mention was that one of the reasons I learned vi is that it was the only editor available across all unix and unix-likes. I think it was even mandated by POSIX. Often these days fresh installs come with nano and not vi, which means that we are tailoring fresh minimal installs to non-power users at the cost of power users. Which is probably what I’m upset about. I like that nano is available and easy to get; i think it should be in the default installation for anything larger than a pxe image or minimal install, but I am not a fan of this kind of behaviour change.
- 3836293648 4y ago
palata 4y ago
> We have a less powerful tool because we want to attract newbies That's exactly it. The modern metrics for anything to be successful is the number of people using it, even if they are completely useless because they did not put any effort into learning the basics. In this case, it would be essentially "ESC", "i" and ":wq". But that's waaaay too hard. No wonder everybody ships a full rootfs in a container for every single executable they make... if learning how to quit vim is too hard, who would want to learn about packaging?
- n0on3 4y ago
  eheh, so much this. I was about to comment in a less sarcastic way but essentially the same thing. I mean, we'll be just fine installing vim and make it the default as needed, I'm not so sure about those raised with the "it has to be easy" mantra.
  - palata 4y ago
    > I was about to comment in a less sarcastic way Yeah sorry, I really did not mean to sound aggressive, just trying to share my point. Communication is hard :-).
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  It's not about difficulty of pressing a few keys, it's about discover-ability.
  - palata 4y ago
    When you start vim, it says "type :help <register>Enter for information". When you do that, it starts with "Move around: Use the cursor keys, or "h" to go left, [...]".
- Zvez 4y ago
  This is so wrong. 'they don't want to learn, lets force them'. Understanding that some people don't need it might be waaaay too hard. Majority of people don't need 'more powerful tool', which needs to be learned for more time than they actually need to use it.
secondcoming 4y ago
> Sufficed to say: I spent a lot of time in the terminal trying to fix things. It’s “Suffice it to say…”
smarkov 4y ago
> the initial learning curve of linux and a modal text editor was far too much > I feel like nano shipping as the default editor is a step-back Not sure why you'd say it's a step back after giving a very valid reason for why it's a step forward. Editing configuration files as a beginner can be frustrating on its own. The added friction of fighting with your editor when you just want to change a single line is not something I wanted to deal with.
speed_spread 4y ago
> honestly the initial learning curve of linux and a modal text editor was far too much [...] > I feel like nano shipping as the default editor is a step-back Make up your mind about nano being the easy way in, or just admit that you like the vim gatekeeping?
tpoacher 4y ago
nano is anything but "not powerful". i have yet to find someone doing complex editing stuff in vim that i cant do (i.e. with the same effort or less) in nano. Unironically.
- tpoacher 4y ago
  In particular, unless I misunderstood the problem, removing the first n characters in nano works exactly as it would in vim. Regex replace "^...." with "". Or replace a selection with the output from a call to 'cut'.

by dijit 4y ago

nkozyra 4y ago

> I feel like nano shipping as the default editor is a step-back. We have a less powerful tool because we want to attract newbies Perhaps, but your experience sounds like a good blueprint for what new terminal users might want. Start with nano move to more powerful tools when you need them.

radicalbyte 4y ago
Windows ships with Notepad, which is fine for 99.9% of users. Those who need more know how to install Notepad++, UltraEdit or Sublime.
dijit 4y ago
my concern would be that I dont think people would reach for the more powerful tools; since they arent being pressured into learning them and its impossible to articulate the power you would get until you have it. I was extremely resistant to learn new things when I thought my current way of working was perfectly fine. It’s only retrospectively that I realise how limited I was.
- kergonath 4y ago
  > I was extremely resistant to learn new things when I thought my current way of working was perfectly fine. It’s not the OS’ job to lecture users about their tools of choice. The Web is full of “vim is the dog’s bollocks” articles, if anyone has a modicum of interest to look at more complex tools. Now, we have to just set EDITOR in the dotfiles for each new student we get starting their MSc project. They have 6 months to do quantum chemistry stuff, not winning flame wars about whose editor is best. And they have already a lot of inane idiosyncrasies to learn in R and the usual Python libraries.
- kapep 4y ago
  It's also hard to articulate power if the people have no need for that power. People stay with nano because it's intuitive and good enough at editing some config files. What else would someone learning Linux even do with a text editor? I've tried to get into vi and emacs but I honestly never found a good use case for them, even as a developer. When I edit files, the changes are usually very small and I spent most time thinking about what to change. The time it takes to execute that change is negligible. If I need to process large files, those are usually in some kind format that can be manipulated with other tools much more easily. And when it comes to programming, modern IDEs are far superior. I don't doubt that you can be very productive with these editors but the "it's more powerful" argument always seems to mean "look how I fast I can manipulate large unstructured text files with some keyboard shortcuts magic", which is irrelevant to me.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
benj111 4y ago
If someone asked you what drill they should buy having never used a drill before, not knowing what theyre going to use it for, but probably 'hanging pictures and stuff'. Would you suggest a top of the line SDS Max drill, or would you suggest some bog standard inexpensive drill that does the basics? less powerful doesn't mean worse if you aren't using the features. It just makes it harder to use.

torben-friis 4y ago

Something that annoys me is that the only good thing about vim is the idea of composable modal actions. Don't get me wrong, that feature alone is powerful enough to choose vim as your editor of choice, but... There is no reason whatsoever why you couldn't have an editor with 2022's standards of UX and newbie friendliness that makes use of the same idea; it just hasn't happened. Even when modern editors adapt vim functionality as a plugin, they just replicate the original design choices. Esc to escape insertion mode is clearly a stupid choice in a modern keyboard setup, but we keep it as a default; we just haven't moved past the original decision. Has anyone heard of a (serious / developed) effort to create such a product?

thanatropism 4y ago
It's janky, but does lapce fit your bill?
- torben-friis 4y ago
  I just took a look and the docs only say there’s “vim like modal editing”. Given there’s no more info I guess it’s just vim mode? There doesn’t seem to be an effort to redesign it at least.
Panzer04 4y ago
I guess vim keybinds are so ubiquitous it’s probably more valuable to stick with them. If you are truly offended by a particular choice, you can always change them.
RMPR 4y ago
> Has anyone heard of a (serious / developed) effort to create such a product? The closest I can think of is Helix. > Esc to escape insertion mode is clearly a stupid choice in a modern keyboard setup, but we keep it as a default; we just haven't moved past the original decision. Nitpicking a bit, but you can also escape insert mode with Ctrl+[ and alt+any normal mode keybinding. I tend to use alt+h/j/k/l but nothing prevents you from doing for e.g. alt+u to escape insert mode while undoing the previous action.

deaddodo 4y ago

> I feel like nano shipping as the default editor is a step-back. I’ve never used a distribution that includes nano, but not also some variety of vi and/or emacs. And there’s no “favorite”/“default” binding in terminal. There are defaults in the GUI, however those are almost exclusively Kate or gEdit. And new users probably use those far more frequently as their first editor. The only qualifier I can figure for nano being a default is the number of tutorials/guides that use it.

ketzu 4y ago
> And there’s no “favorite”/“default” binding in terminal. There is. There is the EDITOR environment variable and the alternatives editor. They will be used when a program triggers an interaction that uses a text editor (e.g., mutt, git and more) instead of manually opening an editor yourself. There are also distributions that only ship with a minimal set of editors, forcing you to install different ones. This might also be considered a "default" editor by lots of people. edit: if you consider a "default binding" only one for manually opening a text file, then you are right, but I don't think that is what people talk about when referencing a "default text editor"
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dijit 4y ago
visudo opens nano on most distributions (ubuntu, debian) despite the name being visudo. whatever the root users $EDITOR variable is set to (and any subsequent created user) is the default. vi/vim wasn't even installed last time I installed ubuntu minimal: but nano was.

Puts 4y ago

> Nano would not help me in such a situation: but vim did it with no complaints; all I needed to know was the incantation. Nano can do regexp search and replace. I think the problem with nano is the menu in the bottom because it makes people think that it's the only things it can do when in fact it's really powerful.

numpad0 4y ago

Couple weeks ago I learned hard way that : key just don’t work in certain combination of host locale and VNC client and client locale. C-c didn’t work, Ctrl+Alt+F2 didn’t work, ssh didn’t work because sshd is not up yet, even VM power cycling button was stuck and didn’t work. Maybe a custom VNC client could have worked. I think I ended up rebooting the host once, just to get out of vi. Second time I just changed locales. nano by default is good.

zimpenfish 4y ago
ZZ would probably have worked for you for quitting (seems to work in plain vi as well as the vims)
- numpad0 4y ago
  This seems a frequent enough issue, that searching "centos can't type colon" in my language yield bunch of SEO blogspams recommending `Shift+11` and `Shift+ZZ`. But neither of which worked in my case; I think Shift+1 was bugged and the file wasn't writable.

forgotpwd16 4y ago

>Nano would not help me in such a situation You could regexp replace all '^[a-z]{4}' (or whatever) with ''. Alternatively you could select area and execute '|sed <whatever>' or '|cut <whatever>'. Advantage: you use the tools you're already familiar with.

alkonaut 4y ago

I guess it depends on how you use the system. I have no intention of ever using a Linux as my “main” system. I’m always a visitor on a strange foreign system. I hold my nose, go in, do whatever dirty deed must be done to get it working again. Usually it’s in some docker image, or an old pi used in my closet, maybe a router, or a cloud vm. But regardless it’s never “home”. I don’t have a personal user, I don’t have a home directory with my own config files. My user is “pi” or “root” or something to that effect. I have been logged in there before, but each time I need to find my way around from scratch. All I need to do is edit some files and get the hell out. And nano is just perfect for it. Perhaps the worst use of vi-as-a-default is in Cygwin (used to run git on windows by some people still) where vi is popped up to let windows users fill in a git commit message. Fantastic UX. I don’t blame Cygwin for it, but git-for-windows could ship with a different default (even notepad would have been better).

Yizahi 4y ago
Exactly this. That's why I often read comments like "just install zsh it's so good", or "I have this vim config with plugins and everything works as I expect" and have to react - "ok, good for you, but I have to use fresh installs of linux exclusively, often embedded, and I just pray it's not a busybox, so only defaults for me forever". Learning vim to edit a few lines a week on some remote host, because they didn't bother to include nano is ugh... Bad.
- dijit 4y ago
  honestly, I think you’re right. one of the things I failed to mention was that one of the reasons I learned vi is that it was the only editor available across all unix and unix-likes. I think it was even mandated by POSIX. Often these days fresh installs come with nano and not vi, which means that we are tailoring fresh minimal installs to non-power users at the cost of power users. Which is probably what I’m upset about. I like that nano is available and easy to get; i think it should be in the default installation for anything larger than a pxe image or minimal install, but I am not a fan of this kind of behaviour change.
3836293648 4y ago

palata 4y ago

> We have a less powerful tool because we want to attract newbies That's exactly it. The modern metrics for anything to be successful is the number of people using it, even if they are completely useless because they did not put any effort into learning the basics. In this case, it would be essentially "ESC", "i" and ":wq". But that's waaaay too hard. No wonder everybody ships a full rootfs in a container for every single executable they make... if learning how to quit vim is too hard, who would want to learn about packaging?

n0on3 4y ago
eheh, so much this. I was about to comment in a less sarcastic way but essentially the same thing. I mean, we'll be just fine installing vim and make it the default as needed, I'm not so sure about those raised with the "it has to be easy" mantra.
- palata 4y ago
  > I was about to comment in a less sarcastic way Yeah sorry, I really did not mean to sound aggressive, just trying to share my point. Communication is hard :-).
paulryanrogers 4y ago
It's not about difficulty of pressing a few keys, it's about discover-ability.
- palata 4y ago
  When you start vim, it says "type :help <register>Enter for information". When you do that, it starts with "Move around: Use the cursor keys, or "h" to go left, [...]".
Zvez 4y ago
This is so wrong. 'they don't want to learn, lets force them'. Understanding that some people don't need it might be waaaay too hard. Majority of people don't need 'more powerful tool', which needs to be learned for more time than they actually need to use it.

secondcoming 4y ago

> Sufficed to say: I spent a lot of time in the terminal trying to fix things. It’s “Suffice it to say…”

smarkov 4y ago

> the initial learning curve of linux and a modal text editor was far too much > I feel like nano shipping as the default editor is a step-back Not sure why you'd say it's a step back after giving a very valid reason for why it's a step forward. Editing configuration files as a beginner can be frustrating on its own. The added friction of fighting with your editor when you just want to change a single line is not something I wanted to deal with.

speed_spread 4y ago

> honestly the initial learning curve of linux and a modal text editor was far too much [...] > I feel like nano shipping as the default editor is a step-back Make up your mind about nano being the easy way in, or just admit that you like the vim gatekeeping?

tpoacher 4y ago

nano is anything but "not powerful". i have yet to find someone doing complex editing stuff in vim that i cant do (i.e. with the same effort or less) in nano. Unironically.

tpoacher 4y ago
In particular, unless I misunderstood the problem, removing the first n characters in nano works exactly as it would in vim. Regex replace "^...." with "". Or replace a selection with the output from a call to 'cut'.