I just wanted to let you know that this comparison absolutely threw me. Of course you're right, they both let you "screen share" but the way you applied a 2022 metaphor to explain 90s tech made me feel a little weird and old.
I guess nano is kind of like a private google docs.
Back in my day it was pine and pico. We did SMTP both ways. And we liked it!
Actually, it weirds me out that the default editor on most Linuxes now is a pico clone. Some don’t don’t even come with a vi out of box.
I started with emacs in college because I liked LISP. But once I was a sysadmin, I learned vi fast because it was the common denominator between Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, BSD, Linux, etc. and I was in a group that absorbed teams that used all of them. …OK, to be fair, our stuff was BSD :).
My first instinct on a fresh/new to me host is to vi. And even when I type nano, I can’t stop my hands from doing vi and get peeved. Fine ‘apt install vim’ or whatever.
It really annoys me, because I learned vi and never learned pico/nano, but now when I e.g. `sudo systemctl edit foo@bar` on a new box I end up in a nano session and have to figure out how to quit and get back in using vi.
2 days of frustration followed by Eureka! Repeat.
I still do that process now just with other stuff. (Why is my program doing X? Why the F am I getting a RST?) I think that’s what hooks people that are really into this world.
I do actually understand nano as a default on a “friendly” desktop, Raspberry Pi, etc. targeting new users. I’m just a grumpy old man.
It’s weird. I know distros are trying to be friendly to new users. But aren’t we past “new users” now for server OSes?
I’d get it on a Raspberry Pi or whatever, where you’re going after kids.
But really, the learning curve and foreign nature of the tools is what got me hooked on Unix in 1997. That and not getting cryptic error messages from Win NT that I could actually dig all the way down and troubleshoot. >:[
In any case, we were discussing metaphors, not technical details.