Changing from a distro that defaults to nano to another that defaults to vim… What to do other than installing nano and changing visudo?
Team Vim. Because I learned the vim basics once 20 years ago and never bothered to learn after that. :D
I see you and raise straight vi.
That’s what I was taught at my first tech internship. It’s all they had on the UNIX system running the webserver in 1998.
I did write some web pages the pulled live data from the backend. I had the pleasure of writing them in C. I got the data binding to some kind of CORBA system using extern variables that were bound at compile time. All of the html (no js or css yet) was hand built and generated from the C code.
vi was the only editor on the system and there was no way to use arrow keys (the UNIX system didn’t have them on the keyboard at all).
I also had the displeasure of building a backup system on a floppy where I had to write a bat script that could manually load a token ring driver, bind a SMB share, load Ghost backup software and backup the local hard drive at under 2mb (yay coax thicknet). The tool used to query and write through the hostname for the backup? Copycon. Fucking copycon in DOS. That showed me how a terrible (but working) tool could be to work with.
Unless an editor can do reasonable vim emulation, I can’t take it seriously. You’re welcome to use it, but I won’t be able to get anything done in it quickly. The vi keys are too ground into my reflexes.
Vim sorely underrated. Great tools/hotkeys. Felt like a master pianist clacking away while the terminal went berserk until suddenly the 2 hour job was done in 20 minutes.
micro for sensible defaults out of the box, and because I don’t like modal editors.
At the risk of restarting the Editor wars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editor_war) from days of yore, I find it interesting that emacs wasn’t even in your list of contenders. I hear it mentioned less frequently these days, so perhaps it’s going by the wayside?
For the record, I’m a vi/vim user! I had the privilege of being taught to use it by an RFC-writing greybeard decades ago, and have used it without thinking ever since.
For those who find themselves on a machine with only vi/vim, or want to learn, here’s a quick primer when editing a file (usually done by typing “vi foo.txt” in a shell) –
:q! …Force quit vi (:q also works – gentler!)
:wq! …Save file and quit vi
i (then type characters) …insert text at current position
A (then type characters) …Insert at end of current line
G …go to first character of last line in the file
/foo …search for first occurrence of “foo” in the file (hit / again to find additional instances)
x …Delete character under cursor
:56 …Go to line 56
yy …Copy the line the cursor is currently on into the buffer
p … Paste the buffer
r (then type character) …Replace character under cursor
u …undo (hit multiple times to undo prior actions)
Second nature after a bit of practice! I used to work with a guy who insisted on using ed. That was… odd.
Not in my case but part of Emacs’ downward-trending mindshare could be due to RMS himself.
Team Neovim.
I looked into ed, then decided its not for me.
nano for quick things; emacs for longer typing sessions.
Emacs its a so-so operating system (that devours your ssd) with a not do good embedded text editor
Emacs comes with Evil mode, which has vim keybindings, which makes a pretty good text editor.
It works well for me. I love how easily I can adapt it for my needs.
I only ever use a terminal based editor for making quick edits of config files, so nano works just fine for me.
I use Helix… Uhhh idk I think it’s nice I guess
There are dozens of us!
🤝
Neovim
I found the correct answer.
Vim forever, any flavour, don’t care.
Why? Does actually exist anything else for the terminal?
nano. I can’t memorize esoterica.
That’s who micro exist. And is so much better.
nano still wins. All the shortcuts are listed at the bottom.
Micro doesn’t need to list the shortcuts because it uses similar shortcuts to notepad and you don’t have to do weird ctrl+x to exit but ctrl+q (for quit). Also copy and pasting isn’t a nightmare in it.
Copy and paste in nano work just fine - no clue what you’re talking about. It uses standards established in the '80s - Ctrl-X for eXit being an even older standard - and clearly lists them visibly for a quick reminder.
I have switched to using helix, so no matter which distro I am on I need to change it to be my default by setting the EDITOR env var.
mcedit
another vote for Neovim!
I realized that I’d forgotten about pico and joe, the latter was my very first text editor (hated it!).
There are also Helix and Microsoft Edit.
nano but i’m a casual. i can use vi/vim in a pinch, but i’m inefficient. ed and emacs are totally foreign
i tend to use a graphical text editor like Kate unless there is a specific reason to do it in the terminal
same. I’ll use vi if there’s nothing else available, but I default to nano if I can
nano, and I’m an expert.
