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Comment by gethly | Hacker News Reader

i've been using nano for server stuff since ever. i could never understand why anyone would us vi/m with its bs shortcuts, making BASIC text editing into a complete **.

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Speed (both in the CPU/memory usage and in speed of editing using advanced commands), backwards compatibility with older servers, ubiquity (guaranteed it is on every server you touch), insane feature count vs Nano, and my fingers mostly stay on the home row.

Its major downfall is the commands are hardly intuitive, but I forced myself to learn it by doing everything in Vim (including shopping lists) and it now feels comfortable.

Then you have situations where you have no choice. I work for a company with over 100,000 servers and they only install Vim and disallow us installing anything else.

Not that we would have time; we’re in and out of each server in five minutes then on to the next ticket.

I won't deny that vim has an "insane" feature count (particularly with plugins), but people who claim this kind of comparison typically vastly underestimate nano's own feature count and flexibility / extensibility.

And I'm surprised this usually comes as a surprise to people, given nano provides the ability for both internal (i.e. macros) and external scripts to manipulate its buffer. In principle you could even run non-interactive vim commands through nano if you really wanted to.

That’s a fair point, but the rest are still relevant. I simply cannot use Nano at my job but once you learn the basics Vi is not bad.

I can see both having a place: vi/vim for more elaborate features and editing capabilities, and nano for the quick "I need to change that one little thing in my config file" fix. I prefer nano over vi every time, but I barely work over ssh more than once a month. There is simply no need for me to know more about vi/vim.

It doesn't hurt to know some basic vi/vim commands though, as you will mostly encounter them pre-installed on even the most exotic distribution.

> i could never understand why anyone would us vi/m with its bs shortcuts, making BASIC text editing into a complete *.

I could never understand why anyone would use nano with its bs shortcuts, making basic text editing (in contrast to basic linear text writing, which even a non-modal editor like nano can do decently) into a complete *.

This is dumb. Sure, some people don't get modal editing. Others don't get how you could live without. It is almost as if people work differently and have different preferences.

I get why OSes come with nano as the default editor, but it's so confining and slow to use when you're used to vim (or I'm sure emacs)

Emacs is a bit special in that the "canonical" way of editing a remote configuration file with it is probably using TRAMP, i.e. connecting your local emacs via ssh to edit the remote file as if it was local.

Vim is the exception, not the rule. Most people don't want a mental model just to type a sentence. Instead of the snark, you could just admit that your preference doesn't align with the median user.

> Most people don't want a mental model just to type a sentence.

"Just typing a sentence" is what I was referring to with "basic linear text writing", for which modal editing indeed does not bring much of a benefit. That's not text editing though.

> Instead of the snark, you could just admit that your preference doesn't align with the median user.

? I explicitly wrote that people work differently and have different preferences. What was snarky about that?

Besides, the median user does not edit configuration files via ssh, so they are hardly relevant here. The median user does not even know what a terminal is. If this was about the median user, then we would be discussing Word vs. Notepad, or whatever.

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