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Comment by its_notjack | Hacker News Reader

I must have used nano for years at this point, and I'm shocked to find out how customisable nano actually is! I tend to use micro[0] on most of my systems now just because it comes with really lovely defaults and keybindings that are a bit more familiar, but this might make me take a second look at nano in future.

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

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It's not just customisable, it's also insanely scriptable. Any action that you can do in nano itself corresponds to a command, and you can create "string macros" that you can bind to key combinations. Additionally it can execute external commands on any nano buffer and return the result. Combining the two is very powerful.

E.g. I have a configuration which allows me to use nano while editing pdf side-by-side, and be able to click on the pdf and land in the correct line in nano, and vice-versa. (and obviously compiling the latex document itself happens via a custom keystroke).

Interesting. Since this kind of scriptable customization sounds like bread & butter emacs -- what tips the scales towards nano, for you?

Simple. I don't know emacs that well :) I didn't even know emacs had a terminal mode until I looked this up; my main experience with emacs was when I was writing prolog and the IDE was emacs based. I didn't find it as nice to use back then so I never gave it a serious shot.

By comparison nano is everywhere and was super-simple to configure and spruce-up with custom functions, so it just stuck with me.

As for other competitors, when comparing to vim, I find it much simpler to use, and to the surprise of most vim users I speak to, equally powerful (at least for my needs).

Before I used micro & ne I used nano, and configured the keybindings to work in the CUA style. I still have the dot files, didn't delete them, but they rarely get used anymore.

I think they recently added Ctrl+S to save by default, even if unconfigured, woohoo.

For CUA aficionados, I recommend dte[0]. It has replaced my nano usage quite a lot.

[0]: https://craigbarnes.gitlab.io/dte/index.html

I personally like msedit.

https://github.com/microsoft/edit

Promising but very barebones. Hard to do without syntax highlighting these days, for example. But I think it would be useful on a tiny machine with openwrt, as micro is huge there. ;-)

> Ctrl+S to save

XOFF ignored, mumble mumble

I knew it! A junior dev recently used CTRL-S in nano and I couldn't believe that it actually worked.

They told me it had always been this way and I felt stupid for a bit. Good to know it's a recent addition.

Same same. Never even occurred to me to look. That's the risk of a (successful) low-friction product though: you use it in quick bursts where the tool is necessary but largely invisible, and you never invest in learning more about it because it works so well with the defaults. There's probably a profound strategic insight buried in there somewhere.

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