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Comment by fatcow | Hacker News Reader

So much fun in this editor. I'm surprised it is getting so much regular development. A breath of fresh air, it has helped edit many config files on remote shells.

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Since I discovered micro[1], it's my go to editor.

[1] https://micro-editor.github.io/

Another Micro advocate! I agree, it's also my go-to editor. It's a great halfway point between breaking out Emacs and resorting to Nano. Micro is dead-simple and gets work done without any complication.

In Micro, selecting text using shift with left/right arrow works (across lines too), but is there a way to make it work when you press up/down arrows? And how do you shift select to the end of the line?

Works as usual for me (I am on a Mac). shift+up/down selects lines. shift+fn+right -- selects till the end of the line.

Thanks, hmm, so shift up/down deselects anything that was selected for me. Shift left/right works and mouse select works. Shift+fn+left/right makes me switch tab. I'm guessing my keyboard shortcuts are different compared to your setup but I don't remember changing anything here (using the regular Terminal app for Mac).

micro > nano

If it's not vim or emacs, a simple editor with CUA key binds should be the default everywhere, not nano.

I love it.

From an editor that most people can exit to an actually powerful editor on its own right, nano has definitely evolved from just being a pico clone.

It's really nice for config file editing if color-coding is enabled and supports the config file you're working on.

Doesn't emacs have a nano mode?

Maybe you can get one. I don’t see a nano mode in MELPA or GNU, and it doesn’t ship with Emacs. Nano is also much more likely to be installed than Emacs, especially since Apple stopped shipping Emacs with macOS.

Apple also stopping shipping nano with macOS (as of 12.3) and went back to pico.

Huh, interesting. Nano is symlinked to pico. I never noticed, since I don’t use it.

GNU Nano is GPLv3 which Apple boycots (its v3 since 2007 according to Wikipedia). Tells us GPLv3 works :-) not sure what the license of Pico is. My first text editor was Q&A on MSDOS, it relied on F-keys, and on Windows 9x I got used to ctrl as modifier. Pico/Pine and later Nano was a natural successor, easy to learn. I use Vim and ST now.

> not sure what the license of Pico is

Apache 2.0. I've used pine as a mail reader for well over two decades at this point, mostly on big old UNIX boxes. GNU nano always felt like the knockoff version.

Right,it got relicensed. Originally it was not available on e.g. Debian.

I don't even think Pico is in active development any more.

I wish they wouldn't do that. Nano is not Pico.

Vim isn't vi, but vi is usually symlinked to vim. And sh is very often a symlink to something like dash or bash.

Regardless emacs can take long to boot up (unless you invoke it with -Q) but nano is instant. So when I need to change one line of a file real quick, nano is the better tool imho.

I haven’t used Emacs in a few years and I don’t remember the startup time being a problem. Maybe because I always left it running?

Anyway, I looked up what people are saying these days. Looks like maybe a second or two?

https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/m8d55l/what_is_your_...

I like JED for that.

Setting up emacs server pretty much solves this problem as each subsequent launch uses the same running daemon. After that you just set up an alias that launches emacsclient like the following:

alias editor='emacsclient -t'

alias visual='emacsclient -c -a emacs'

Unfortunately, I don't expect to have emacs server running in an EC2 instance intended to run a company service since it needs to be a copy of prod instance (for testing/development). In such instances nano is helpful.

Ah, yes that is where tramp emacs package comes in handy, as it allows one to edit remote files within your local instance of emacs.

Note there is also helm-aws [https://github.com/istib/helm-aws] for managing AWS EC2 server instances directly from Emacs.

Even without a server, modern Emacs can load quite swiftly by making use of deferred loading on demand. I stopped using an Emacs server some time ago because it loads fast enough, now.

I launch Emacs when I log in just after booting. It restores its desktop (all the frames and buffers) and I never close it. Even though it has to restore a couple of dozen buffers and nearly that many frames it takes only a few seconds anyway.

As I am in Emacs anyway opening a file is very fast unless it's a really large file, multiple giga bytes.

Why would anyone close Emacs? Do you close the web browser too? What about X Windows?

can't you just... use nano?

Is it that weird editor they tend to put on our distro these days were we end up having a lot of i x r R :s/foo/bar :w and :q embedded in the text and that we need to close quickly in fear of adding syntax error before doing an EDITOR=vi ?

Who is "we"? You might be the only person out there who types out 7 full vim commands before opening your eyes to look at what app is running

That was tongue in cheek.

I would say the problem is not to not know which app you are using but muscular reflexes. Sames happen to me if I open gedit, notepad.exe or even an text processor such as writer or word.

I had to put vim binding to make vscode bareable otherwise I kept making errors.

Then `export EDITOR=vi` in your profile? Or in whichever global config file in /etc is appropriate, or possibly using your distro's alternatives system? This is an extremely solvable problem.

oh I didn't say it wasn't solvable, just that it catches me off guard every time I install a fresh new OS.

That's fair:) I would say that you should automate it by using ansible or something like that, but I've done that and there's still a very jarring few minutes while you're running the initial install and getting enough of a system for ansible to run on.

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