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> I feel like nano shipping as the default editor is a step-back. We have a less powerful tool because we want to attract newbies

Perhaps, but your experience sounds like a good blueprint for what new terminal users might want. Start with nano move to more powerful tools when you need them.

Windows ships with Notepad, which is fine for 99.9% of users.

Those who need more know how to install Notepad++, UltraEdit or Sublime.

my concern would be that I dont think people would reach for the more powerful tools; since they arent being pressured into learning them and its impossible to articulate the power you would get until you have it.

I was extremely resistant to learn new things when I thought my current way of working was perfectly fine.

It’s only retrospectively that I realise how limited I was.

> I was extremely resistant to learn new things when I thought my current way of working was perfectly fine.

It’s not the OS’ job to lecture users about their tools of choice. The Web is full of “vim is the dog’s bollocks” articles, if anyone has a modicum of interest to look at more complex tools.

Now, we have to just set EDITOR in the dotfiles for each new student we get starting their MSc project. They have 6 months to do quantum chemistry stuff, not winning flame wars about whose editor is best. And they have already a lot of inane idiosyncrasies to learn in R and the usual Python libraries.

It's also hard to articulate power if the people have no need for that power. People stay with nano because it's intuitive and good enough at editing some config files. What else would someone learning Linux even do with a text editor?

I've tried to get into vi and emacs but I honestly never found a good use case for them, even as a developer. When I edit files, the changes are usually very small and I spent most time thinking about what to change. The time it takes to execute that change is negligible. If I need to process large files, those are usually in some kind format that can be manipulated with other tools much more easily. And when it comes to programming, modern IDEs are far superior.

I don't doubt that you can be very productive with these editors but the "it's more powerful" argument always seems to mean "look how I fast I can manipulate large unstructured text files with some keyboard shortcuts magic", which is irrelevant to me.

If someone asked you what drill they should buy having never used a drill before, not knowing what theyre going to use it for, but probably 'hanging pictures and stuff'. Would you suggest a top of the line SDS Max drill, or would you suggest some bog standard inexpensive drill that does the basics?

less powerful doesn't mean worse if you aren't using the features. It just makes it harder to use.

> We have a less powerful tool because we want to attract newbies

That's exactly it. The modern metrics for anything to be successful is the number of people using it, even if they are completely useless because they did not put any effort into learning the basics. In this case, it would be essentially "ESC", "i" and ":wq". But that's waaaay too hard.

No wonder everybody ships a full rootfs in a container for every single executable they make... if learning how to quit vim is too hard, who would want to learn about packaging?

eheh, so much this. I was about to comment in a less sarcastic way but essentially the same thing.

I mean, we'll be just fine installing vim and make it the default as needed, I'm not so sure about those raised with the "it has to be easy" mantra.

> I was about to comment in a less sarcastic way

Yeah sorry, I really did not mean to sound aggressive, just trying to share my point. Communication is hard :-).

It's not about difficulty of pressing a few keys, it's about discover-ability.

When you start vim, it says "type :help <register>Enter for information". When you do that, it starts with "Move around: Use the cursor keys, or "h" to go left, [...]".

This is so wrong. 'they don't want to learn, lets force them'. Understanding that some people don't need it might be waaaay too hard. Majority of people don't need 'more powerful tool', which needs to be learned for more time than they actually need to use it.

I never said "let's force them". My point is rather that it is fine for projects to not design for the majority. And I really feel like this is quite an unpopular opinion, somehow. The measure for success is typically the number of users, and of course it means that it has to be as simple as possible.

To me, it's perfectly fine to set nano as a default for a distro targeting beginners, but it is also perfectly fine to set vim as a default and say: "if using vim to change the default editor is too hard for you, then you are not the target audience".

> Nano would not help me in such a situation: but vim did it with no complaints; all I needed to know was the incantation.

Nano can do regexp search and replace. I think the problem with nano is the menu in the bottom because it makes people think that it's the only things it can do when in fact it's really powerful.

Couple weeks ago I learned hard way that : key just don’t work in certain combination of host locale and VNC client and client locale.

C-c didn’t work, Ctrl+Alt+F2 didn’t work, ssh didn’t work because sshd is not up yet, even VM power cycling button was stuck and didn’t work. Maybe a custom VNC client could have worked. I think I ended up rebooting the host once, just to get out of vi. Second time I just changed locales.

nano by default is good.

ZZ would probably have worked for you for quitting (seems to work in plain vi as well as the vims)

This seems a frequent enough issue, that searching "centos can't type colon" in my language yield bunch of SEO blogspams recommending `Shift+11` and `Shift+ZZ`. But neither of which worked in my case; I think Shift+1 was bugged and the file wasn't writable.

>Nano would not help me in such a situation

You could regexp replace all '^[a-z]{4}' (or whatever) with ''. Alternatively you could select area and execute '|sed <whatever>' or '|cut <whatever>'. Advantage: you use the tools you're already familiar with.

> the initial learning curve of linux and a modal text editor was far too much

> I feel like nano shipping as the default editor is a step-back

Not sure why you'd say it's a step back after giving a very valid reason for why it's a step forward.

Editing configuration files as a beginner can be frustrating on its own. The added friction of fighting with your editor when you just want to change a single line is not something I wanted to deal with.

I guess it depends on how you use the system. I have no intention of ever using a Linux as my “main” system. I’m always a visitor on a strange foreign system. I hold my nose, go in, do whatever dirty deed must be done to get it working again.

Usually it’s in some docker image, or an old pi used in my closet, maybe a router, or a cloud vm. But regardless it’s never “home”. I don’t have a personal user, I don’t have a home directory with my own config files. My user is “pi” or “root” or something to that effect. I have been logged in there before, but each time I need to find my way around from scratch. All I need to do is edit some files and get the hell out. And nano is just perfect for it.

Perhaps the worst use of vi-as-a-default is in Cygwin (used to run git on windows by some people still) where vi is popped up to let windows users fill in a git commit message. Fantastic UX. I don’t blame Cygwin for it, but git-for-windows could ship with a different default (even notepad would have been better).

Exactly this. That's why I often read comments like "just install zsh it's so good", or "I have this vim config with plugins and everything works as I expect" and have to react - "ok, good for you, but I have to use fresh installs of linux exclusively, often embedded, and I just pray it's not a busybox, so only defaults for me forever". Learning vim to edit a few lines a week on some remote host, because they didn't bother to include nano is ugh... Bad.

honestly, I think you’re right. one of the things I failed to mention was that one of the reasons I learned vi is that it was the only editor available across all unix and unix-likes. I think it was even mandated by POSIX. Often these days fresh installs come with nano and not vi, which means that we are tailoring fresh minimal installs to non-power users at the cost of power users. Which is probably what I’m upset about. I like that nano is available and easy to get; i think it should be in the default installation for anything larger than a pxe image or minimal install, but I am not a fan of this kind of behaviour change.

Git for windows makes a huge deal in its installer about how the default is unchanged for compatibility and how you should pick nano or vsc instead

It should really at least give notepad as an option and strongly suggest that over vi unless you are looking for compat (compat with what?).

Tbh I don’t know why you’d want a bash for it to begin with. The only thing I miss in other shells (cmd/PS) is that you can’t make shell aliases in git.

Compatibility with old scripts I presume. And notepad is probably on the list too.

But of course you want bash with git. PS and cmd are just painful to use

Something that annoys me is that the only good thing about vim is the idea of composable modal actions.

Don't get me wrong, that feature alone is powerful enough to choose vim as your editor of choice, but... There is no reason whatsoever why you couldn't have an editor with 2022's standards of UX and newbie friendliness that makes use of the same idea; it just hasn't happened.

Even when modern editors adapt vim functionality as a plugin, they just replicate the original design choices. Esc to escape insertion mode is clearly a stupid choice in a modern keyboard setup, but we keep it as a default; we just haven't moved past the original decision.

Has anyone heard of a (serious / developed) effort to create such a product?

It's janky, but does lapce fit your bill?

I just took a look and the docs only say there’s “vim like modal editing”. Given there’s no more info I guess it’s just vim mode? There doesn’t seem to be an effort to redesign it at least.

I guess vim keybinds are so ubiquitous it’s probably more valuable to stick with them. If you are truly offended by a particular choice, you can always change them.

> Has anyone heard of a (serious / developed) effort to create such a product?

The closest I can think of is Helix.

> Esc to escape insertion mode is clearly a stupid choice in a modern keyboard setup, but we keep it as a default; we just haven't moved past the original decision.

Nitpicking a bit, but you can also escape insert mode with Ctrl+[ and alt+any normal mode keybinding. I tend to use alt+h/j/k/l but nothing prevents you from doing for e.g. alt+u to escape insert mode while undoing the previous action.

> I feel like nano shipping as the default editor is a step-back.

I’ve never used a distribution that includes nano, but not also some variety of vi and/or emacs. And there’s no “favorite”/“default” binding in terminal.

There are defaults in the GUI, however those are almost exclusively Kate or gEdit. And new users probably use those far more frequently as their first editor.

The only qualifier I can figure for nano being a default is the number of tutorials/guides that use it.

> And there’s no “favorite”/“default” binding in terminal.

There is.

There is the EDITOR environment variable and the alternatives editor. They will be used when a program triggers an interaction that uses a text editor (e.g., mutt, git and more) instead of manually opening an editor yourself.

There are also distributions that only ship with a minimal set of editors, forcing you to install different ones. This might also be considered a "default" editor by lots of people.

edit: if you consider a "default binding" only one for manually opening a text file, then you are right, but I don't think that is what people talk about when referencing a "default text editor"

visudo opens nano on most distributions (ubuntu, debian) despite the name being visudo.

whatever the root users $EDITOR variable is set to (and any subsequent created user) is the default.

vi/vim wasn't even installed last time I installed ubuntu minimal: but nano was.

> Sufficed to say: I spent a lot of time in the terminal trying to fix things.

It’s “Suffice it to say…”

> honestly the initial learning curve of linux and a modal text editor was far too much

[...]

> I feel like nano shipping as the default editor is a step-back

Make up your mind about nano being the easy way in, or just admit that you like the vim gatekeeping?

nano is anything but "not powerful".

i have yet to find someone doing complex editing stuff in vim that i cant do (i.e. with the same effort or less) in nano. Unironically.

In particular, unless I misunderstood the problem, removing the first n characters in nano works exactly as it would in vim. Regex replace "^...." with "".

Or replace a selection with the output from a call to 'cut'.