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Comment by catskull | Hacker News Reader

This is something I was pondering the other day: given nano's proliferation, I wonder how many devs use it in a regular basis? My suspicion is that nano is more popular than vim or emacs, just used less. Many devs who do not primarily use a command line editor use nano when they have to. It's like a screwdriver: it's nobody's favorite tool, but it's probably the most popular.

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I wouldn't be too surprised if you were right. In an advanced comp sci class I took recently I was surprised to find that when we had to ssh into the university's supercomputer and edit some code something liked 75% of students used nano and only a quarter used vim. These are people early in their career using a low latency connection but it still surprised me.

My experience is that it's easier to remember the commands for Nano. vi confuses the hell out of me.

I'm not actually a Comp Sci major or anything, maybe that matters?

It does matter. When you're editing code in all kinds of terminals over 4 years the basics become ingrained. Really knowing how to quit at first and being able to get to the different modes makes a big difference. Also using it on your home computer helps. Once you get used to it other editors seem cumbersome.

The thing about vim is that the interface is a language. It certainly takes some learning. Check out vim-adventures.com

I fall in this category, I use neither Vim nor Emacs because I never had a need to learn them and I'm happy with lightweight GUI editors like Geany and Notepad++. Nano on the other hand was the default command line editor in the university computer lab, so I had to learn the basics to get around and still use it today.

I don't write code in nano, but it's fine for editing configuration files when you're on SSH. For writing code, I would never use an editor that does vendor lock-in by not supporting standard shortcuts for common things such as copy, paste, search and replace.

I use it day in and day out. It's my favorite editor due to its simplicity. Most of my work is editing source and I find the command set and feature appealing for that. When I need to do serious line oriented editing or regular expression work I switch to vim.

I'm also in the "nano -w" camp. It's been muscle memory for over a decade now.

Took me years to mentally/muscle memory replace pico -w with nano -w, on many machines i would symlink nano to pico

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