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Comment by npstr | Hacker News Reader

What's wrong with using nano for that?

> It's everywhere.

It almost litterally is. Even busybox contains a vi clone. While I have encountered more systems without nano nor Emacs than I can remember. Plus, there is no excuse for learning the basic set of commands: i,ESC,x,u, and maybe navigating with the letters (which I'm not proficient at).

I only have to edit a file on Linux once every couple of months of so - I tired of forgetting how to exit vi (or enter/exit edit mode, save the file... just about anything really), so started installing nano as the first thing I do on any system. Nano is so much more obvious than vi.

Most people can't install arbitrary software on every system they access.

This exactly. I am pretty sure that if you gain [adb] shell access inside of an android recovery partition (as a random example), you have read-only access to the system, with only busybox at your disposal. Thus vi, but no nano.

Also, there's a reason why there are so many "can't quit vi" memes.

Reading the comments about vi... Am I the only one that knows/uses ZZ to save and quit?

As I tend not quit vi that often compared to the time I spend inside, I prefer to use the more explicit version. I have made some mistakes in the past typing `^X-O` in nano instead of `^X-N` because of muscle memory, thereby overwriting a file I didn't want, and I am afraid of repeating this if `ZZ` became part of my muscle memory.

vi is enshrined in POSIX; nano isn't.

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