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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

One of my former co-workers loves Nano. It does what he needs, it was installed on all our systems, if not it is safe to just apt-get install it. Most of our documentation said this like "edit this line in this file, using: vi <path to file>." Every time he wrote documentation, or updated existing, he'd change "vi" to "nano".

It always makes me smile and think about him when I spot "nano" somewhere in the documentation.

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Nano's great advantage over vi(m) is that you can instantly see how you can save the current file and exit the editor, e.g. when confronted with it because of a "git commit" on some server. So, if you configure an editor that anyone should be able to use, I would prefer Nano too...

> Every time he wrote documentation, or updated existing, he'd change "vi" to "nano".

It might be better to change it to "nano -w" instead; IIRC, some versions of nano hard-wrap lines by default (which corrupts files where line breaks are significant) unless you remember to always use "nano -w".

You can add a "set nowrap" line into your home ".nanorc" file so "-w" is applied by default.

Relying on configuration, either in your home ".nanorc" or in its /etc equivalent, is too risky; you might be using ssh (or docker/podman/etc) to a machine or VM or container which doesn't have that configuration. It's the same for relying on having a nano version where that's the compiled-in default; you might be using a machine or VM or container with a different nano version than you're used to. It's less risky to always type "nano -w" everywhere (or use a different editor, one which never had hard-wrap enabled by default in any version).

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