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Comment by picodguyo | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for you work on Nano! I'll never understand the elitism around text editors in the Linx world but am glad a user-friendly option like Nano exists.

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Indeed. I kinda wish they would go the rest of the way and implement the standard keyboard commands that every other editor in the world (apart from vi/emacs) uses though.

Ctrl+c, ctrl+v, ctrl+x, ctrl+a, shift+arrow/home/end/pgup/pgdn/etc. etc to select text. It would completely eliminate the learning curve to edit text on linux, which seems like it could only be a good thing.

I actually think CUA binds are limiting and it's good to learn something else, but if you do want them, emacs has an option for enabling them. I've never tried it, but it's there.

vim works quite well with standard keyboards. Put this in your .vimrc:

set nocompatible

behave mswin

Or use `evim`.

Btw, 'set nocompatible' is never necessary in a vimrc file. When Vim detects a user vimrc file, it automatically sets nocompatible.

Control W is really annoying. But you can rebind keys, but that wasn't untill fairly recently that you could that.

Have a look at https://github.com/zyedidia/micro, which has those keybindings by default. Mouse support too. Completely eliminated the text editing learning curve for me, and years later, I still use it happily.

Edit: Oh, I see it's been recommended in this thread already.

I loved using Nano for a long time before I picked up Vim. I don’t get the elitism either, Nano is a great editor.

I like to think that the proliferation of different kind of editors reflects the incredible diversity that exists in what people want from an editor.

Nano is pretty solid. I think my muscle memory for using vi/vim instead has come from sometimes working on some really old nix systems that are air gapped from the world and therefore you work with what you have. I'm used to and use vim for everything at this point, but when dealing with new nix users that won't be working on crazy old stuff I always just steer them to nano.

Is the pico in your username a coincidence, or just particularly subtle and clever?

Nano's not really a programmer's editor. It's fine for writing short shell scripts and configuration files and you can't beat its ubiquity and user-friendliness but it lacks the tools and customizability most programmers prefer for production coding.

I'm a professional developer and I use Nano as my main text editor, entirely by choice. I've never missed the cool features that other editors like Vim and Emacs have, even though I've used both in the past.

I stopped warflaming but I really struggle on nano these days :)

weird right

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