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Comment by chipotle_coyote | Hacker News Reader

To promote this to a top-level comment, because I think it's important context: nothing in the README file says the point is to be "beginner-friendly". As far as I can tell, that's something that Hacker News or whoever submitted this used as a description. Neither the word "beginner" nor the word "friendly" appear in the README; its goal is to "be the smallest functional Emacs in less than 2000 lines of C."

I think somebody incorrectly described Atto as comparable to nano/pico, and these comments are dragging it because it's not something that it was never intended as.

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OP here, I just paraphrased the announcement:

> To ease the transition for new users, #NetBSD -current now includes an alternative editor to vi(1) and xedit(1) in its base system, atto(1). https://man.netbsd.org/atto.1

> It is a modeless screen-based editor similar to nano, pico, xedit, or emacs. It is only 48 kilobytes, making it suitable for inclusion in the rescue system.

I think it's fair to call it beginner-friendly, in context of BSD and vi, but maybe indeed it shouldn't be a part of the title.

I can't imagine a beginner really knowing what is going on in nano.

Every time I get launched into nano/pico on a new system I find it very confusing. To use the help menu you need to know that ^-X means Ctrl-X and M-X means Alt-X. Why "Write Out" and not "Save"? And when I "Write Out" I'm offered DOS format or Mac format, and options to Append or Prepend (not even sure what that does).

It's completely bizarre if you're used to something like Notepad or Word.

> I can't imagine a beginner really knowing what is going on in nano.

When you launch nano without a file loaded, there's a notice at the bottom of the screen: [ Welcome to nano. For basic help, type Ctrl+G. ]

Press 'Ctrl + G' and it takes you to a help page that says, among other things, "Shortcuts are written as follows: Control-key sequences are notated with a '^' and can be entered either by using the Ctrl key or pressing the Esc key twice. Meta-key sequences are notated with 'M-' and can be entered using either the Alt, Cmd, or Esc key, depending on your keyboard setup."

You can't force a user to read docs or learn how the programs they're using work, but this is a reasonable attempt.

> When you launch nano without a file loaded, there's a notice at the bottom of the screen: [ Welcome to nano. For basic help, type Ctrl+G. ]

Does it also show that when invoked with a filename? If not: it should! (newbie user invoking with a filename *also* doesn't know how to use the editor. So that help pointer should be shown in both cases).

I use nano the same way I use notepad. I open a file, edit it, hit close, and agree to save when it complains to me.

>Why "Write Out" and not "Save"?

At least "Uncut" has been renamed to "Paste".

First time I opened vi I had to power cycle the computer to get out of it. If nano/pico is not user friendly, vi is user user antagonistic.

Oh I absolutely agree, none of vi, emacs, nano/pico make any sense to a beginner. vi probably the worst because of the modes. But I my point was just that I don't think nano is particulary beginner-friendly. Maybe the least worst though.

That's because no one knows their history anymore.

Nano was a (bloated as usual) GNU clone of Pico. Its only reason for existing is GPL freedumb nonsense that was popular back in the day. It copied the UX of Pico.

Pico was not developed as a standalone editor; rather it was the builtin editor for the Pine email reader. Hence the weird keybindings — it followed the UX of the email client.

Pico stood for PIne COmposer.

It became a simple universal editor because vi and emacs sucked and for some reason no one felt it necessary to invent something better.

Users repurposed the editor from a mail client because it was already there. Nearly every university Sun box in the 90s had Pine installed for reading email.

It was written by the same guy that invented IMAP at the University of Washington.

Can't wait for the Rust clone of Nano then the cycle will be complete.

Joe editor dates back to 1991 and it came with jpico, jmacs and jstar as pico, emacs and wordstar clones as a hard link.

Nobody learns to use an editor - or for that matter, learns anything - by figuring out a history lecture first.

People that do that are weirdos, and yes, I'm one. But I don't expect regular people to learn that way.

> Its only reason for existing is GPL freedumb nonsense that was popular back in the day.

These days we need more GPL, not less. We need AGPL and apparently, soon, AntiLLM-GPL.

I should clarify.

The reason Pico became popular — if you went to university in the 90s — is normal people, not just turbonerds, needed the occasional ability to edit simple text files on Unix hosts.

They were already using Pine to read their email, so why not use the editor that used the same keybindings they already knew for sending mail?

Just FYI, they did try to improve that a bit. Release notes for nano v8.0:

> Command-line option --modernbindings (-/) makes ^Q quit, ^X cut, ^C copy, ^V paste, ^Z undo, ^Y redo, ^O open a file, ^W write a file, ^R replace, ^G find again, ^D find again backwards, ^A set the mark, ^T jump to a line, ^P show the position, and ^E execute.

> Above modern bindings are activated also when the name of nano's executable (or a symlink to it) starts with the letter "e".

So if you symlink nano to /usr/bin/editor and make it the default $EDITOR, then you now do get CUA-like bindings by default.

There’s still a lot of more things they perhaps should enable by default. I don’t know whether you’ve looked into .nanorc, but you can turn on stuff like syntax highlighting and line numbers, it’s just all off by default.

I don’t actually use nano myself, but I was really taken aback by how featureful it is when you look closely. Not st the level of Vim or Emacs, but more than expected. I basically stumbled upon someone on Reddit /r/unixporn that "riced" their nanorc and it piqued my curiosity.

For most people though, I think micro is a better fit than nano if you want a terminal CUA-style editor.

> Above modern bindings are activated also when the name of nano's executable (or a symlink to it) starts with the letter "e".

Maybe stupid question but do you then need to run nano through the symlink to get the new bindings or is the existence of a symlink enough? Wouldn’t nano have to check every directory for a symlink to itself to do that? There’s no way to get all symlinks for a specific file without checking the whole file system, right?

I believe you have to run it through the symlink, and that it just checks argv[0] to decide. It’s the same Vim does, FWIW: if you run it via a symlink called `vi` it enters a vi-compatible mode, and if you run it as `evim` it suddenly acts as a non-modal text editor, and as `vimdiff` it enters the diff mode.

As someone who was a beginner once, I found nano leaps and bounds more intuitive than vim. You can quite easily stumble your way through nano with minimal exerimentation, and once you figured out that ^ stands for control you can just use the handy always-visible command reference at the bottom

Sure, GUI software is much more intuitive. But if you start with the constraint of being a TUI editor with no mouse support, nano does extremely well

Ok, we've removed beginner-friendliness from the title above. It's still interesting!

I think the new users aren’t necessarily beginners, and this targets new BSD users who aren’t beginners w.r.t. using CLI-based computers.

I’m thinking that because the text you referenced also says:

“for users who are not accustomed to text editors with separate insertion and editing modes, and includes support for editing UTF-8 text.”

I’m not sure the group “used to editors without visible menus, but doesn’t know vi” is very large, though.

I would never drag pico. I wrote software that's been packaged in Linux distros in pico. And I lost the urge to be The Smartest Guy In The [Room/Mailing List/Forum] a long, long time ago.

what's really the point in being the smartest person in the room? you'll never learn anything!

sometimes humans do irrational things / have illogical behaviour just to glorify their own ego. it happens also to the very best sometimes

Yep, whenever you find yourself being the smartest person in the room, you need to find yourself a smarter room.

Or just learn how to teach.

> Or just learn how to teach.

Most people don't want to learn (in particular not learn sufficiently hard to really improve).

Motivating students to want to learn isn't rocket science, just a rare skill to see.

If it is not rocket science, how does it work?

You have to get them excited about the subject. Do something cool with it. Of course, you have to be well-versed enough in the subject to be able to do that for the uninitiated. But if you're always the smartest person in the room and you're not motivated or in the position to be constantly finding a newer crowd, then this resolves down to meeting the folks you're with where they're at, then pushing the conversation into deeper grounds. If you're really that much smarter than them, this should be easy, if not, maybe you might have something to learn from them after all.

Or you could just, yannow, give up on the intellectual rat race. It's pretty exhausting, and winning at it isn't all it's cracked up to be.

True, many a junior dev I've had to work with was convinced they're the smartest person in the room, good at what they do but so full of themselves they're unable to adapt, acquire new knowledge or consider new paradigms.

Learning requires some amount of humbleness, to accept you don't know everything.

Not only that, but you constantly feel like Idiocracy is playing out in real time, and that everyone else around you is closer to monkeys than a rational empathetic human... it's exhausting, lonely and debilitating. Then you realize there are people much smarter than you, and you wonder how they must feel.

Reminds me of that House MD episode where the delivery driver was a secret genius who was abusing DXM to dumb himself down just to feel happy.

"For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief."

I used pico or nano as my everyday unix coding editor for something like fifteen years, starting in the late '90s. It was just fine. I couldn't stand vi and didn't see the point of emacs; I type faster than I think, so I never found that text-editing was enough of a bottleneck to make sophisticated automation worth the effort.

I only stopped using pico/nano after writing my own editor, which blatantly stole pico's interface design.

> nothing in the README file says the point is to be "beginner-friendly"

"for users who are not accustomed to text editors with separate insertion and editing modes"[0] could be construed as "beginner-friendly" (albeit with some squinting, I'd concede.)

[0] https://man.netbsd.org/atto.1

From the announcement

> To ease the transition for new users...

So I would consider it for beginners ("new users") and friendly ("to ease").

Well nano pico atto ... the name makes it comparable. Why would you expect people to not draw that connection?

I think the main take-away is that vi/vim is too complicated for many folks. I use nano a lot on the commandline. For quick editing it is so much more convenient than vim.

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