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Comment by tivert | Hacker News Reader

> The difference between micro and nano is that nano's keyboard shortcuts are pretty opinionated, while micro's are the ones used by most (GUI) applications nowadays:

Opinionated, or just old and consistent? Nano is a clone of an editor related in 1989. Things weren't as settled back then. IIRC, I remember Ctrl-X was used to exit some DOS apps. IIRC, the current "GUI conventions" originated as Mac-isms in 1983/84.

> Ctrl+S for saving, Ctrl+F for find, Ctrl+Z for undo, Ctrl+Q to exit etc. etc. There is also a helpful hint at the bottom of the screen that you can press Alt+G to see the shortcuts, or Ctrl+G for some help.

So, about that Ctrl-C...

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> Opinionated, or just old and consistent?

That old hotkeys didn't survive the evolution so it doesn't make sense to support them anymore.

> That old hotkeys didn't survive the evolution so it doesn't make sense to support them anymore.

No. It makes sense to support them if the userbase is familiar with them. Nothing is more annoying than having changes like that forced on you.

Then there's the fact that the "GUI standards" conflict with other command-line standards in a pretty serious way. Every command shell on Windows I've ever used uses a different convention than the "GUI standard" for copy-paste for exactly that reason (e.g. Windows Command Prompt's "mark" stuff, PuTTY's select/middle-click behavior).

Won't such hardcore oldtimers use vi anyway? I thought the point of nano was to be like notepad.

> I thought the point of nano was to be like notepad.

No, the point of nano was to be like pico.

> userbase is familiar

I think that every user who can use terminal, knows combinations like Ctrl + S (Save) or Ctrl + C (Copy). So they are familiar to them as well and should cause no problems.

For me, for example, those combinations from vi, nano or emacs are simply weird and non-standard. And I assume that they are "non-standard" for everyone who was born after 1980 and have never seen a PDP or something from that era.

Therefore it doen't make sense to support those key combinations only because 40 years ago they were used in PDP and other archaic systems.

> Therefore it doen't make sense to support those key combinations only because 40 years ago they were used in PDP and other archaic systems.

OK, you write the memo about replacing Ctrl-C for SIGINT.

Lmao what userbase, you're talking about software from 40 years ago

For nano?

Every single Linux user who edits text on a cli amd hasn't bothered to learn vim.

Every person who deployed code or edited configuration files without a graphical user interface knows about nano.

How many of those people are attached to nano's key combos?

Probably a decent chunk of them, due to having them committed to muscle memory.

As one of them I would guess less than 10% of users

Yes, it's time inferior gui apps start freezing when you press C-z.

Correct. I’ve used pico & nano as my primary editors for 25+ years. A fun one to work around with nano in shellinabox browser tab is ctl+w (Where is/“Find” function in nano/pico, Close tab in Chrome/Firefox). nano let’s you remap it to ctl+f in nanorc at least.

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