GNU nano 3.0 released | Hacker News Reader

GNU nano 3.0 released

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110 pointsjrepinc43 comments

I'm a Linux/Unix "devop" since 15 years and I still use nano every day or second. It's the default $EDITOR in Debian and derivates and at some machines I did not consequently set EDITOR=vim.

Congratulations to the developers of nano. It's a timeless modern terminal editor which can be operated by novices as well as experts.

I absolutely love it when someone makes a tool that "Just works".

Have you considered using sshrc? https://github.com/Russell91/sshrc

It lets you take basic shell config with you when you ssh. You could ensure you always had your $EDITOR set to vim and have a basic vim config ready.

It's also really nice to take my prompt with me and not have random vanilla/terrible shell prompt that's set on whatever server.

Wow, this looks like a gem.

However, I can imagine many scenarios when this fails if the target machine has a very different software version setup (and older different Linux distribution, for instance). Would require some fine tuning of parameters, but sounds promising!

I moved to micro[0] editor a while ago. It saves me a couple of seconds every time I need to edit something in /etc/* (especially when copy-pasting some text sections in the middle of the file). But it is not adopted by all distributions yet.

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

> But it is not adopted by all distributions yet.

Is it adopted by any distro as a default text editor?

Looks like fedora has micro in her default package repository[0]. I doubt it is set in $EDITOR by default though.

[0] https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/micro

Yep, micro is nice, much more common bindings (provided you didn't grow in emacs, vim, pico, etc.) However it doesn't work very well under tmux (ne has the same problem).

I wasn't aware of this editor. Thank you.

Looks like a cool alternative to nano, but if it isn't included by default on everything (like nano) I don't see why I would use this over Vim or Emacs.

I have to give myself a kick in the pants at my own irrationality. For some weird reason, I use vim. I'm not very good at it, and I only use it for basic things like editing configuration files. Every time I use nano, I prefer it, but somehow just am in a habit/rut of typing vi blah. And I call it irrational because vim is totally non-obvious and not self-describing how do the most basic tasks, and yet I keep hitting my head on a wall. Maybe I should remove vim, install nano, and make vi an alias of nano!

Part of the problem is that vi is pretty much guaranteed to be on any system you log into, including many 'embedded' systems. So although I was historically an emacs user, I have learned the minimum of vi commands to get by, but no better than that.

Recently made this argument to someone. They open vi/m just to immediately jump into insert mode and never leave.

I love using vim and would encourage anyone to go through vimtutor and start learning it, but if you're just not interested, using nano can save you a lot of headache.

I second vimtutor for the interested. This Vim help page is indispensible to those who aren't:

    :help index

Every Vim shortcut is there and organized.

Nano is what I teach my kids (5 and 8) to code on the terminal in. It's fantastic!

Oh man, that's some hardcore parenting. Big respect. Would be nice if you could share you journey with your kids after a couple of years

Thanks :) Let's see how far I (they) get!

Thanks for mentioning this. I also started teaching my 3 kids using a terminal and nano instead of a gui editor. Consequently they are 15, 17, 20 and all are very comfortable in a terminal environment.

It feels amazing that my 17 year old daughter uses sed, awk, grep, cat, nano, etc instead of GUI apps.

Nice. I think the best way to learn how to use programming tools is to actually see the need for them yourself. Starting with a basic text editor, no make, no debugger etc. is great.

Why though? Micro is a much better editor if you have to use a terminal and VSCode is much much better if you don't.

Seems odd to teach old needlessly difficult software just because you had to learn it.

With the widespread availability of raster graphics, I wonder how often people actually have to use a character-cell terminal for editing text. (I appreciate the coolness factor.)

I agree but it is useful when editing files over SSH. Remote X and VNC are rather a pain to set up and really not that good.

I use a terminal text editor when I'm doing something in the terminal, need to do a quick edit and don't want to have to switch away from the terminal into a GUI editor. For me that's typically commit messages and not-too-complex config files. In such cases using a terminal editor is simply more convenient...

Really not interested in getting into editor wars here. Sorry. :-/

Congratulations

https://nano-editor.org/who.php

What are the alternatives to nano? (Just out of curiosity)

micro

vim?

Hallelujah

This is a pretty open ended question. Alternatives include everything from vi/vim, ed, emacs, to pico (and probably some I have forgotten..)

If you would read between lines (of a single line), I meant those ones that aren't vim or emacs related clones.

Vim and emacs are huge, powerful texteditors that aren't competing with nano. Ed is...unusable in 2018. So just pico.

(ed was unusable in 1988) :-)

I like ne

http://ne.di.unimi.it/

I use zile.

I like Zile but it lacks Unicode support.

mc (midnight commander) has a built in editor that is actually pretty great. "mcedit" if you have mc installed.

That's a nice alternative. Never thought of that. On most machines I have mc already installed so it's a real package installable alternative (unlike micro).

Alternatives as in "easy-to-use no-hassles console editor"? JOE brings more features and it even comes with a nano (actually pico) mode accessible with the jpico command. Ne comes with macros and it uses standard keybindings (C-s,c,v,z...). Both predate nano and are the repos of most distros.

Question could be considered flamebait. Ahhh, the good times... editor wars on usenet.

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