I never understood the hate Nano gets from vi users. Nano does many things quicker and easier than vi. For example, search & replace. Would I code in Nano? No. Do I use Nano to edit configuration files and make other small edits? Absolutely.
Back in the day when vim would open it felt more as if my whole computer broke and nothing in the universe made sense anymore.
Nowadays with nano, I simply feel and think: ugghhh soo SLOW!
I wonder how other people experience it :P
Maybe someone could add vim binding support...
I admit it is kind of underwhelming to read his answers. I am always hoping for some tidbits where he can state that he has seen the way. But for the most part it just pure hard work and true expertise of the systems programming domain. I guess the thing is evidence that true innovation often is rigorous and dry engineering.
So, nano, why not. I for one use jed. I also finally learnt how to exit vim.
Maybe it's because my day job is web development working with overly hyped up hipster front end developers (I'm a backend dev myself) - but I found his rather plain answers with no "eureka" in it to be quit refreshing. Linus is one of my heroes specifically because the primary focus in kernel development must be intense focus on fundamentals. I got into programming because of people like Linus so it's refreshing (to me) to here that being "boring" is just fine and even if you are boring you can still be a titan of industry by just being _that damn good_.
Or maybe that's just me. Nano, vim, it's all good, but for the past 3 years I strongly prefer vim :P (before that I prefered nano because I couldn't find a good vim tutorial)
And if you really want to shave off the extra 2 keystrokes for the 'M-R' toggle and 'A' option, you can always create a new macro in your config file that does just that.
There may be instances where Nano does something quicker but search and replace would seem to be a perfect example of the opposite where Nano has taken a quick one line thing in vi and turned it into a multistep process for simplicity.
Nano is different from vi because it targets a different set of users. Many of them use the terminal infrequently, so you can't assume they'll ever build up the kind of muscle memory that makes vi so efficient. You can't even assume that they'll remember any commands, so the commands are displayed prominently at the bottom. There's a reason so many Ubuntu tutorials for beginners use nano instead of vi.
For what Nano is mostly used for, Nano has won.
The reason I hate nano was that it's been forced upon me for in my view entirely misguided attempt to make the commandline more approachable. So that now instead of any competent unix person needing to have at least minimal skills with two arcane (but powerful) editors (vi - for editing, and emacs for shell keybindings at least), you now also need minimal skills with an essentially equally arcane but not at all powerful or, useful editor (once you have basic competence with either emacs or vi at least).
Wouldn't it have been much better to have provided a friendlier vi(m) config by default, given that this was already the default editor on any unix system before nano came along and there is actually some fair amount of benefit in learning it, because it's a powerful and widely supported set of keybindings (emacs and every major IDE have good vim emulation these days)?
They need to justify all the time they spent learning and configuring vi/vim to themselves and to others.
Cost of learning: 1 hour (when I was bored on a long train ride and didn't have access to internet). I did the tutorial 3 times.
The basics of vim are easy to learn. Caveat: I do remember I had like 5 false starts in learning vim (and remembering nothing). This was before I knew vimtutor and googled for random tutorials. IMO, a lot of vim tutorials make out the vim basics to be much more complicated than they are. Vimtutor doesn't, vimtutor is the perfect example of a magic bullet.
Just type vimtutor in the CLI and go.