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.
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.
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?
NANO I just need simple, and tell an me how to save and exit without abstract key codes.
Emacs
how do y’all deal with that pinky
Micro is pretty nice, has limited mouse support in the TUI line numbers highlighting. That or Neovim customized
vim, mainly cause I haven’t figured out how to quit yet.
I use Helix… Uhhh idk I think it’s nice I guess
There are dozens of us!
🤝
Helix for modal, Fresh for non-modal.
Hmmm, Fresh looks interesting, didn’t know about that one!
Nano, because it’s the only one I can remember how to quit from without power cycling the computer.
You are in edit mode and you need to get out of it. Press ESC, and then colon which will show in the text area at bottom of window. If you want to save, push w, then q and the enter to quit. If you want to quit without saving, you have to force with !.
Escape, colon, (W)ith save, (Q), Enter
Or
Escape, colon, (Q)uit, !, Enter
If you just want to use the text editor commands, you just do escape to be able to enter text on the line.
Top Tip: open another terminal and kill the task from there
( /s )
Either you forgot your sarcasm tag or you shouldn’t be using computers 🤣.
micro for sensible defaults out of the box, and because I don’t like modal editors.
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.
Neovim
I found the correct answer.
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.
nano. I can’t memorize esoterica.
That’s who micro exist. And is so much better.
nano still wins. All the shortcuts are listed at the bottom.
Micro doesn’t need to list the shortcuts because it uses similar shortcuts to notepad and you don’t have to do weird ctrl+x to exist but ctrl+q (for quit). Also copy and pasting isn’t a nightmare in it.
Copy and paste in nano work just fine - no clue what you’re talking about. It uses standards established in the '80s - Ctrl-X for eXit being an even older standard - and clearly lists them visibly for a quick reminder.
Yeah cutting text with ctrl+k instead of ctrl+x (because that’s exit) and copying with alt +6 instead of ctrl+c.
Le
Mao.
In emacs ctrl+y is paste, which is weird to me because i’m pretty sure even in emacs the logic is that y stands for yank, but in every other program i’ve used so far yank means copy, not paste. In the end though i feel like muscle memory from other editors don’t bother me as much, and i can learn multiple at the same time. I started with evil mode for vim bindings for a short while, but now i’m diving into pure emacs bindings.
Yeah, that’s what the shortcut hint shows, champ.
Why doesn’t my Lemmy comment box show shortcut hints? How will I know the shortcut for copy, cut and paste? I tried pressing alt+6 but it did nothing. Curse you Ecmascript from 1997!
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
