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Comment by priyanshuraj | Hacker News Reader

The article uses nano throughout. Is nano a popularly used editor? I have not seen anyone around using nano. I see vim, atom, sublime, vs code but never nano. Just curious if nano is popular.

If nano is popular what are its pros and cons?

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Nano is the easiest-to-use terminal-based editor that you're likely to find on a Unix system by default. All the important key commands are listed at the bottom of the screen and everything! It's a great editor to recommend in beginner tutorials since it requires very little setup or learning to use, but if you're already happy with a different one there's probably no reason to switch.

I was kind of surprised that they had installation steps for it, to be honest–macOS certainly ships with it.

I use it on a daily basis. It's simple, fast and has syntax highlighting. And it's still actively developed[0] (latest release: 2020 December 2 - GNU nano 5.4 "Terre des hommes")

[0] https://www.nano-editor.org/news.php

I've found nano really easy to pick up for quick introductions to editing files via a terminal.

Nano seems to have a shallow learning curve for new users in comparison to vi, vim emacs as it works similar to other simple text processors.

It isn't as powerful as other editors and can't be configured as much but for some, especially beginners, that's a benefit.

to be honest nano is the best thing in this article, everything else is just disaster, nano is at least light weight and functional (imagine using an IDE for this)

Personally it's simple and all the important shortcuts are displayed on the screen.

If I ssh into a machine to change a config value I prefer it to vim/vi.

I'm not going to write anything using it, but for quick edits it's perfect.

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