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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

As a Windows native, for years I felt limited when shelling into Linux systems, because all editors felt weird to me. Obviously the solution would be "just learn vim already" but I'm lazy. I settled on nano because it at least shows what shortcuts are available, saving me from having to Google "how to find text in vim" every time. But its shortcuts are weird (to me) and even the descriptions are. UnCut? WhereIs? Huh?

Micro really got the UX right for people like me and it made me more happy than I expected. It's now the EDITOR on just about every non-GUI system I have access to and I love it.

Thanks, Micro authors!

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I have the same feeling of limitation when using Windows. As someone who's used to Linux and other UNIXy systems, the idea of having and using GUI software on servers is... distasteful to me, to put it mildly. GUI configuration makes changes easy, but change management extremely difficult, which is not a good combination. Therefore I struggle with administering Windows because there is no useful editor by default when you use it remotely over the console, leading to a lot of friction to just "browsing around" on a remote Windows machine, and most of the time installing what I need is not an option due to the lack of a default, trusted package manager. (though that might be changing, finally)

While PowerShell is, well, powerful and nowadays there's at least OpenSSH for for secure and convenient remote access, unfortunately it's rarely installed and PowerShell over SSH is still very janky and even when it's there, many things assume a GUI, which is anything but convenient to me. My workflows tend to use SSH all over the place to make remote access transparent.

Btw fwiw I fully agree with you. I really like Windows as a desktop OS (or, more accurately, I dislike it the least), but the idea of using a GUI based server is just super weird to me.

Even pre micro I preferred Linux for servers, for this reason primarily. I understand Linux way less well than Windows but I navigated down that insane ISS config panel once, a decade ago, and decided that once was enough :-)

Given Windows' low popularity as a server OS these days it seems to me that plenty devs-who-use-Windows have a similar opinion.

As someone who grew up on Windows machines and got a MacBook Pro in high school, using Windows is extremely painful, and I built many PCs in my gaming phase. In my experience, macOS has been blatantly superior in every way. I found plenty of Arch flavors that I like much better as well.

I’m curious, why is Windows your favorite desktop OS?

I started to heavily using vim since the last few months because writing code through SSH is very attractive for my current situation.

For me, learning vim is like learning an foreign language, a few hundred words (or few hotkey/:commands for vim) can get you started, but it's not easy to reach the level of native speakers, and some old rules in your language (for example, HJKL keys in vim vs the "natural" arrow keys) will interfere your progress.

Maybe I'm going to piss many people off here, but vim is not an user-friendly text editor. An user friendly editor should pop some kind of prompt when I pressed the first g/G key and show me what I could press the next, not telling me to read :help (which probably has the volume of a dictionary at this point).

Based on my 2 minutes with Micro and the information I read from it's `help defaultkeys`, the size of it's hotkeys are more healthy and manageable. So that's a plus from me.

I would say that vi (at least the more modern ones) is user-friendly, but not beginner-friendly. You really do need to start by running vimtutor.

Eh, I wouldn't even call it that. I consider it to be similar to git: you can do some incredible things with it, and people who know how to use it can do so effectively, but there is a lot of room for improvement.

and read an introductory text about the basic concepts like https://stackoverflow.com/a/1220118/5208540 (2800+ Votes, not mine)

> An user friendly editor should pop some kind of prompt when I pressed the first g/G key and show me what I could press the next,

See vim-which-key [1] and which-key.nvim [2] for something similar to this.

[1]: https://github.com/liuchengxu/vim-which-key

[2]: https://github.com/folke/which-key.nvim

For those add-ons, don't you have to provide them with the prompts? You still need to actively _know_ how to do something to have it provide you with information.

You can use something like LunarVim which has everything already setup.

Absolutely agree that it's not a user-friendly text editor. It _does_ increase productivity when you're proficient. TBH being proficient took me a lot of time, mostly fueled by wanting to be cool in my first job (it failed), all in all I'm not entirely convinced it's a good investment.

But being able to edit using Vim at all is very very useful to edit files on servers, which happens very often in various situations.

I will 100% agree that neither emacs nor vim are "beginner-friendly", I would hesitate to call them "not user-friendly", they're just very particular about what users they're friendly with.

> Maybe I'm going to piss many people off here, but vim is not an user-friendly text editor. An user friendly editor should pop some kind of prompt when I pressed the first g/G key and show me what I could press the next, not telling me to read :help (which probably has the volume of a dictionary at this point).

For anyone that wants this: these kinds of plugins are usually called "which key" after the Emacs mode. Most of the Emacs distros ship with which-key by default and it works very well with evil.

I get the sense that they're less popular on the Vim end, though I'm not sure why.

There's always VSCode with the Remote SSH plugin, unless you prefer the minimal setup.

> An user friendly editor should pop some kind of prompt when I pressed the first g/G key and show me what I could press the next, not telling me to read :help

You might be interested in the Kakoune editor. Despite being superficiality similar it's not Vim compatible, which may make it a nonstarter, and it has its own flaws that keep me from using it, but it makes a point of showing on-screen help for almost every command as you're typing.

Some IDEs support full development over SSH now - VSCode and IntelliJ - so you can be freed from vim.

"freed from vim."

... Does not compute.

Vim is simple but not easy.

https://youtu.be/rI8tNMsozo0

Vim is user-friendly the same way Unix is user-friendly: it's not. It's user-centric.

Yes, but not just a Windows native, a DOS edit, Netware, Motif/CDE native, similar to Mac OS dialects.

IBM CUA, from mainframe terminals to OS2. Later Geany and Sublime Text, recently VSCode.

Unix was earlier so didn’t get with the program. I limped along with nano and a subset of vim for years. Noticed “ne” about ten years ago, was ok.

Micro is a godsend and in the Ubuntu repos now. Debian too? Not sure.

Anything not CUA compatible feels aged... unfortunately, the standard "terminal" keyboard support is very poor regarding this things (escape key is often broken, modifier keys often compose well at all). What is really needed is a new terminal standard to support this.

The (probably not workable) alternative is to deprecate the whole thing and make a higher level protocol.

> Obviously the solution would be "just learn vim already" but I'm lazy.

Vim keybindings are great. :) But I'd rather people learn vim keybindings out of curiosity rather than necessity.

Even though it feels weird, it will still pay off to learn the very basics of vim. The reson for that is simply that its pre-installed on most environments - including servers and embedded linux devices, and available in a ssh session. On some of those environments it might not be desireable/allowed to install additional software.

Basics for me is i,a,:q,:wq just be able to edit something and get out of the editor again. Adding d,y,p,/,^,$ makes it a bit more productive.

What server distro doesn't have nano out of the box these days?

Not a server distro, but it still surprised me, since I'm used that pretty much all of the distros I use have nano. ChromeOS Linux (container?) doesn't have nano, from what I can tell it only has Vim, on the topic of Vim, using J to go down was (and is) quite confusing, probably because I feel like Up should be before Down...

> on the topic of Vim, using J to go down was (and is) quite confusing, probably because I feel like Up should be before Down..

I think I shared this intuition. Thankfully using vim keys on many things for a long time has ground it out of me, so it never trips me up anymore

Yup. Great, well balanced light editor with almost 0 installation worries. Just copy the binary over.

> saving me from having to Google "how to find text in vim" every time

Why would you have to do it every time? Sure, if you do it very rarely then you may forget, but I dunno... In any case, the way you search in vim is the way you search in `less`, `mupdf`, etc.

> saving me from having to Google "how to find text in vim" every time

Escape, slash, and write whatever you want to find, and press enter:

  [Escape]/foo[Enter]

After a few weeks, you'll start trying to do it on every editor...

Since I haven't checked on this one for 10 years now: How screwed am I for using Ctrl-c instead of Esc? Using nvim mostly these days

I think most "hardcore" vim users do re-map Esc for something else, like Ctrl-C (or maybe it's a built-in alternative keybinding) or Caps Lock.

I've used vim for 25+ years, but always alongside other editors (only used it as my main driver for 4-5 years sometime in the 90s), so I've always stuck with Esc (which, is the default anyway).

That said, I wanna jump back on with Nvim 5.0 when I get the chance to have a free day to setup and configure it to my liking.

I did it the other way around putting Esc on CapsLock for the whole system. But yes, Esc is a pretty horrible key to reach for, especially considering how often it is used when interacting with vim.

^C is not fully equivalent to Esc. It won't trigger InsertLeave autocommands and doesn't work with a count.

Ah so that is why slash is the search shortcut in so many apps, like Google ones for example.

I thought ed is the standard text editor?

But I agree on micro. As a Linux user who refused since 20 years up until now to learn vi or emacs nano and than micro was a real pain relive.

Is it? It could be as far as line-oriented text editors are concerned, but when it comes to screen-oriented text editors, I think it is vi. vi was a step up from ed (because it was not line-oriented but screen-oriented!). Initial release of vi was 45 years ago. :)

Oh and for the curious:

> The name "vi" is derived from the shortest unambiguous abbreviation for the ex command visual, which switches the ex line editor to visual mode. The name is pronounced /ˌviːˈaɪ/ (the English letters v and i).

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html

Oh right, I totally forgot about it! Good one. :)

The mcedit (editor from midnight commander) has been my choice of editor before I switched to vim. Thanks for the micro suggestion.

mcedit has been a huge time saver for anyone familiar with Norton Commander.

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