Changing from a distro that defaults to nano to another that defaults to vim… What to do other than installing nano and changing visudo?
Nano because like why would I bother with anything else? It’s just a quick and dirty text editor.
neovim through nvf on NixOS. I’m not even a power user, I just had a shit mouse in college and didn’t want to use it and now I’m hundreds of lines of Lua too deep to go back. This is my life now.
Micro is pretty nice, has limited mouse support in the TUI line numbers highlighting. That or Neovim customized
Mostly Neovim and Nano. Tried out ed in the UNIX4 tape that got recovered, was strange but fun to see where sed, grep and other commands got their name from.
GUI is still good old Sublime Text, but I almost completely switched to terminal based editors, I guess because of the nice work flow.
Team Vim. Because I learned the vim basics once 20 years ago and never bothered to learn after that. :D
I see you and raise straight vi.
That’s what I was taught at my first tech internship. It’s all they had on the UNIX system running the webserver in 1998.
I did write some web pages the pulled live data from the backend. I had the pleasure of writing them in C. I got the data binding to some kind of CORBA system using extern variables that were bound at compile time. All of the html (no js or css yet) was hand built and generated from the C code.
vi was the only editor on the system and there was no way to use arrow keys (the UNIX system didn’t have them on the keyboard at all).
I also had the displeasure of building a backup system on a floppy where I had to write a bat script that could manually load a token ring driver, bind a SMB share, load Ghost backup software and backup the local hard drive at under 2mb (yay coax thicknet). The tool used to query and write through the hostname for the backup? Copycon. Fucking copycon in DOS. That showed me how a terrible (but working) tool could be to work with.
Unless an editor can do reasonable vim emulation, I can’t take it seriously. You’re welcome to use it, but I won’t be able to get anything done in it quickly. The vi keys are too ground into my reflexes.
Vim sorely underrated. Great tools/hotkeys. Felt like a master pianist clacking away while the terminal went berserk until suddenly the 2 hour job was done in 20 minutes.
NANO I just need simple, and tell an me how to save and exit without abstract key codes.
vim, mainly cause I haven’t figured out how to quit yet.
Emacs
how do y’all deal with that pinky
nano, vi, geany, kate…
I prefer nano - simple to use & always available. I manage remote systems often from my mobile using termius: config file editing, writing simple scripts for some analysis/automation tasks and recording task notes and status. Using a tablet I might use vi but generally prefer nano.
Helix: Barely needs a config. But they are also pretty close to done with a plug-in system for the stuff that isn’t implemented by default :D
Nano. It’s the easiest to use
At the risk of restarting the Editor wars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editor_war) from days of yore, I find it interesting that emacs wasn’t even in your list of contenders. I hear it mentioned less frequently these days, so perhaps it’s going by the wayside?
For the record, I’m a vi/vim user! I had the privilege of being taught to use it by an RFC-writing greybeard decades ago, and have used it without thinking ever since.
For those who find themselves on a machine with only vi/vim, or want to learn, here’s a quick primer when editing a file (usually done by typing “vi foo.txt” in a shell) –
:q! …Force quit vi (:q also works – gentler!)
:wq! …Save file and quit vi
i (then type characters) …insert text at current position
A (then type characters) …Insert at end of current line
G …go to first character of last line in the file
/foo …search for first occurrence of “foo” in the file (hit / again to find additional instances)
x …Delete character under cursor
:56 …Go to line 56
yy …Copy the line the cursor is currently on into the buffer
p … Paste the buffer
r (then type character) …Replace character under cursor
u …undo (hit multiple times to undo prior actions)
When done with a command like this, hit Esc to go back into normal mode.
Second nature after a bit of practice! I used to work with a guy who insisted on using ed. That was… odd.
Yeah but op was comparing editors, not OS’s. Https://emacsos.dev
well it is an editor, it was intended to be an editor, you just have the options to watch videos within it 😂
Heh. Sounds like a modern variant of Zawinski’s Law: https://www.laws-of-software.com/laws/zawinski/
Been using it (not often beyond basics for home server container administration) for years but I always get confused with searching vs search and replace vs global search
/<search> (n for next instances)
:%s/<search>/<replace>
:g/<search>/p (grep was named after this one IIRC, Global Regular Expression Print)
And often I just use :%s to search and highlight all instances and don’t press enter because I forget the others and I often have to search and replace for docker comppse snippets.
:h?
:q
Not in my case but part of Emacs’ downward-trending mindshare could be due to RMS himself.
Is RMS still actively involved in Emacs?
When I first started using Linux I used Kate, I know, I know, not command line, but I didn’t needed a command line editor for my own computer. Eventually I started using nano for quick edits and that became my default CLI editor for a while. I don’t remember what I used as an IDE back then, but maybe it was Eclipse, although I think it was mostly just Kate.
Eventually I decided to learn either VI or Emacs, and a friend who used Emacs pushed me to that side. I ended up switching everything to emacs, CLI, IDE, I even learnt org-mode and had tables and presentations in it.
Eventually my pinky started to hurt too much, so I switched to Pycharm for python, and kept emacs for C++, text edits and org-mode. I ended up slowly switching emacs everywhere and reverted to nano.
Some years back I decided to properly learn vim. I have been using nvim for a few years, and while it’s not the everything tool that emacs was for me, it’s still pretty darn useful. I also haven’t become a movement ninja and oftentimes I go
wwwwwwto get where I want to be. But still, there are some very nice shortcuts that I use a lot like Change Inside/Around or Delete X lines. Macros are cool, and sometimes feel magical, but other times they don’t work like I expected and I can’t figure out why. I don’t see myself changing to something else, the ubiquity of vim shortcuts in other programs makes it very convenient when I have to use something else.Kate 👀
Neovim for terminal but often I use kate for gui because I still don’t find vim commands more efficient
