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Comment by rgoulter | Hacker News Reader

IMO, nano does seem like the terminal equivalent of notepad. The key value proposition being that it's easy to use without having to learn how to use it, especially compared to what you have to learn for vi/emacs. - Most of the time you won't need to be editing files in the terminal, so it's a good 'emergency' tool just in case you need to.

TBH, I wasn't aware of sophisticated features like automatically commenting/uncommenting. But I think putting effort into memorising those is less useful than putting effort into learning at least the basics of vi or emacs. -- There should be no shame in using nano.. I just can't agree that it's worth putting time in to memorise those keybindings.

Though now I wonder why there isn't a VSCode-equivalent (emphasis on "works out of the box" and "easy to use") for the terminal.

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The key selling point of Nano for me is displaying the core controls in the footer at all times

This used to be a fairly standard thing in the days of DOS, shame it is not more widespread - my memory for keyboard combinations is atrocious

Seconded. I mostly use vim now, but especially for beginners discoverability - or at least displaying how to exit the current program - is an underrated feature.

Absolutely. This is also why it's the right choice for the default editor: it lets anyone use it even if they've never seen it before.

100%. When I need to remotely help less experienced users solve some issue on a remote server, those controls in footer are incredibly useful.

> Though now I wonder why there isn't a VSCode-equivalent (emphasis on "works out of the box" and "easy to use") for the terminal.

The terminal is effective because you can combine all kinds of tools together. Or as some say, the shell is the IDE.

If you're searching for a single application that performs all these tasks out of the box, there is no longer sufficient benefit in using the terminal. A terminal variant of VSCode would be inferior to the GUI variant.

There was a Sublime-Text-equivalent for the terminal, but I cannot remember its name for the life of me.

https://github.com/slap-editor/slap ?

Thank you for sharing - this looks fantastic!

Micro?

TextAdept was my go-to for that.

Back in the day (mid-90's), many that I knew using nano were former users of Q-Edit.

It was pico then, nano came out a bit later. But I used it because it was what pine used and I got used to it. Then I decided to learn vi and emacs sometime later.

I have used both Pico and Nano. The selling point of Nano to me is it being small and available. I don't do my day to day work in nano, but even in the most minimal system it is normally there, which makes it useful for configuration changes in a pinch.

Another editor that works similarly to Nano, that most people don't seem to know about, is Micro (GNU) Emacs. Although it's not as small or common.

https://github.com/troglobit/mg

nano is available because it was made to be, pico is similarly small. nano was created, in large part, as a response to the license of pico, while (at the time) intending to be a drop-in replacement. Since it was under the GPL and became included in most distros, it was developed further than pico, because users of pico had to seek it out. It wasn't present on most systems without installing it yourself (or having an admin who did).

Might have been, it was so long ago.

No need to memorise anything. All the shortcuts appear on the menu right at the bottom (and if you want more detail, there's the help page, also linked to on the menu at the bottom)

There are shortcuts shown on the bottom, and I thought that was all the shortcuts.

What surprised me is there are shortcuts like M-3 to comment/uncomment a line, or ^Q to search. These don't appear at the bottom.

Spacemacs or SPF13 are kind of like that.

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