Hacker News Reader

Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

I will judge your ability to code by your preference of editor

If someone is turning out high quality code in what seems an awful choice of dev environment then I'd just shrug my shoulders and move on. I don't have the mental energy to work up disappointment or frustration at how another person might, counterintuitively, be just as productive using tools I don't like.

I think R is far superior to SPSS but really don't care if someone decides to use SPSS and produces quality analysis, especially if a lifetime of experience in it made them highly efficient in its use.

Many of the things you mention are absolutely in nano :) Like highlighting, jumping to a line, importing.. I don't have the time to do a point by point comparison but trying nano for 5 minutes doesn't equate knowing it, just like with vim.

I'm not big into coding anymore and nano is handy for my muscle memory, coming from DOS :) It's good enough for my purposes. Sure vim is more powerful but it's not as accessible to the casual user. It's a good tool for its job just like vim is. They're just different jobs.

Absolutely. I use loads of those features including regexp in nano all the time and it works fantastically well. For me it's the fact that it's small (so available on nearly every platform) and the command interface is so quick. It's light, fast, and snappy to drive - no context "shifts" to get to commands, and I can do "power user stuff" with just a simple key shortcut _which is written on the screen so you can see it_ most of the time. It's easy, and that's worth more than a thousand vims. See also the success of Visual Studio Code.

>And if you have an especially strong opinion, I'll consider you even more experienced, even if your strong opinion differs from mine; simply by virtue of having of strong opinion it means you likely have been using it for years and have found other tools inadequate for your skills.

If you really think strength of opinion indicates experience, then clearly you don't have a lot of experience with people...

Jumping to line numbers can be done with mouse. Refactoring and search/replace can be either sed or grep and copy/paste. Filtering text through a command can be done in your shell. Nano has syntax highlighting. Importing from a file is copy and paste. Not sure when you really need column numbers. Split pane editing is tmux or multiple windows.

Now I'll take my customized and plugin-full neovim setup over that any day, but that does not mean a developer cannot be fully competent with nano. I've worked with large projects where I didn't have access to neovim or my setup and just zsh and vi were enough to get the job done. Having to use nano would have been more of an inconvenience but it would have not been in any way undoable. Understandably, a dev would be more productive with their preferred setup, but if a dev couldn't work without it, that would be a red flag.

> It's not gatekeeping,

> you bet I will judge your ability to code by your preference of editor,

FYI. That's called 'gatekeeping.'

It's kind of a misnomer then, isn't it? He's not preventing anybody from doing anything, just forming a preconception based on what I think a lot of people would agree is sound logic:

That on average, people whose first instinct is `nano` to edit a file in Linux have less experience than people whose first instinct is `vi(m)` (or, selfishly `emacs`).

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Gatekeeping

> When someone uses a hobby or interest as a means of elevating themselves above others to give oneself a sense of being superior transforming their passion or knowledge about a particular subject into an ugly tool of self-inflation.

The shoe fits.

First editor I used was vi/vim.

For years it was the only editor I could use. (My CS education and school server use predates Pine/Pico/Nano and later on, it was a long time before nano was an option on more restrictive/specialized machines)

I still prefer nano.

In the end, I don't give a fuck what you use as long as you can get the job done.

Passing judgement on what people prefer to use is the de-facto definition of 'gatekeeping.'

The fact that you don't know that nano can jump to line numbers calls into question your judgement. (As can notepad.exe for the past two decades or so)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com