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Comment by qwertyuiop924 | Hacker News Reader

This is good news: It's also good to actually see RMS actually compromising.

Also, nano is actually a useful tool, despite its reputation as the editor for those who don't know what they're doing. It's an excellent editor for quick edits that aren't worth pulling up emacs for. Although I would never reccomend it for Real Work, that's not really its intent. And it owns its field, having crushed all competition save vi, which is really in its own class.

Also, nano is frankly a lot more powerful than a lot of people give it credit for: It's just not programmable, which is a necessity in editors these days.

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> as the editor for those who don't know what they're doing

To be honest, I do think of nano as exactly that. Let's say "the editor for newbies", which sounds slightly less condescending.

Being the editor for newbies is not a bad thing. There are, at any given point, many newbies who just want to make that one change to that one configuration file without learning a whole programmer's text editor. There are, by now, probably plenty of people of who use GNU/Linux just to surf the web and read their email (and run LibreOffice or GIMP), who don't ____ing care about text editors except for that one time they need to add an entry to crontab or sudoers or something.

If you have never touched vi before, its user interface at first seems like a slap in the face (to put it mildly). Having used vim as my editor of choice for a couple of years at one time, I still remember, vividly, the first time I tried to use it. It was no fun at all. The same goes for emacs (which I love dearly).

If you want to do serious programming / system administration, learning one of the advanced editors is - at the very least - good advice. But these days, such people are probably in the minority, even on GNU/Linux. And having an editor the rest of the population can use without requiring a Ph.D. in emacsology is a Good Thing, IMHO. It's not something one should feel sorry or condescending about.

...That's actually my point, kind of. While I wouldn't wish nano on anyone working on a large project, a lot of unix administration work (well, at the level of the system on your desk, anyways... professional SAs have a lot more to do, and should be feared and respected) is light text editing: that's precisely nano's problem domain.

I used nano exclusively for years, and though those days are gone, I don't appreciate people who look down upon it and its users, just because it wasn't built to compete with emacs.

I've been programming for about 5 years (probably not "serious programming") and I use GUI editors, and nano is pretty similar to them.

As someone who has used Linux since 1999 (starting with Slackware) and FreeBSD and OpenBSD since the early 2000s, I'd say I'm no longer a "newbie". Yet, I use nano daily because it's so simple and accessible. You only need to remember a few key combos, and for basic edits there is simply no need to break out vi or emacs or a GUI editor.

A simple, useful tool does not always equate to "newbies only". In fact, I'd say it's the UNIX way: A simple tool that does one job really well.

Or to put it another way: Why would I break out my 30 piece combination wrench set when I just need to turn a nut a little tighter with my adjustable wrench that's right there next to me?

When you work with the combo set from 5 to 16 hours a day and immediately know the size of the nut on sight, you feel exactly the opposite sentiment.

Probably not the average use case though.

Excellent point, and I'm getting there with all the work I've been doing restoring my Bronco.

Fair points. But this is also true:

> There are, at any given point, many [non-]newbies who just want to make that one change to that one configuration file without [using] a whole programmer's text editor.

> There are, by now, probably plenty of people of who use GNU/Linux (...) who don't ____ing care about text editors [when it comes] for that one time they need to add an entry to crontab or sudoers or something.

> If you want to do serious programming / system administration, learning one of the advanced editors is - at the very least - good advice. [But even then, a simple editor is always useful.]

My point is: not just for newbies.

In a way, maybe it's good it's not programmable. This ensures that on any machine or environment you see Nano, you can expect it to behave exactly the same. If you want something super customizable you can just use vi(m) or emacs.

Nano is like Windows Notepad but for the CLI. It does one thing one thing only, no matter where you are.

I understand why nano was designed that way, but it does mean it's unsuitable for Real Work. It works well for light text editing, which, let's face it, is probably the most commonplace activity on a given unix system.

This is exactly what I use it for. When I'm ssh'd into a server without my vim config, I prefer to use nano simply because I'm so used to my own vim. Using any other vim config is actually difficult, especially since I'm not actually that knowledgable about vim.

Nano takes the cake in this situation. It's everywhere, it's easy.

I would assume that the compromise in this case that some developers of nano will do copyright assignment while others won't, and FSF will still do GPL enforcement.

The previous dispute as I understand it is that FSF has a all or nothing approach to copyright assignment. Either a GNU project assign all copyright, or a GNU project assign nothing and FSF do not enforce the projects license.

It's worth also keeping in mind that there isn't necessarily anything wrong with it being an editor for newbies. Emacs can be pretty intimidating to learn straight off.

It's lightweight: my point is there are reasons for using nano beyond "d'oh, I don't know what I'm doing." You don't bring up emacs to edit fstab, or your hosts file. As a result, it's popular among newbies. But that doesn't mean it's without merit, as is all too often implied.

With emacsclient you can easily open those files, quickly, in Emacs; in fact, I would argue you should. fstab has its own editing mode in Emacs with syntax highlighting and so does hosts.

...do you really need syntax highlighting for fstab?

nano is great! OK - it might not have the feature of VIM and has some keybinding that need to be changed out of the gate (newer nano version you can do this), like changing Cntrl-W to Cntrl-F (Search) and a couple of others that just to make things sync between different programs.

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