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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

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
Git for windows makes a huge deal in its installer about how the default is unchanged for compatibility and how you should pick nano or vsc instead
- alkonaut 4y ago
  It should really at least give notepad as an option and strongly suggest that over vi unless you are looking for compat (compat with what?). Tbh I don’t know why you’d want a bash for it to begin with. The only thing I miss in other shells (cmd/PS) is that you can’t make shell aliases in git.
  - 3836293648 4y ago
    Compatibility with old scripts I presume. And notepad is probably on the list too. But of course you want bash with git. PS and cmd are just painful to use

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

Git for windows makes a huge deal in its installer about how the default is unchanged for compatibility and how you should pick nano or vsc instead

alkonaut 4y ago
It should really at least give notepad as an option and strongly suggest that over vi unless you are looking for compat (compat with what?). Tbh I don’t know why you’d want a bash for it to begin with. The only thing I miss in other shells (cmd/PS) is that you can’t make shell aliases in git.
- 3836293648 4y ago
  Compatibility with old scripts I presume. And notepad is probably on the list too. But of course you want bash with git. PS and cmd are just painful to use