crossposted from irc
nano ftw.
this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2025
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I learned on VIM, but when I found Nano there was no going back.
That's like saying you ate sourdough but then discovered wonder bread
More like sourdough doesn't go good with everything. Different tastes for different things.
It's time for you to find Micro. The cycle continues.
wow, nano is usually everyone's first editor and them moving on to Vim. interesting to invert that. what do you like about nano?
That depends a lot on when they started.
When I first installed a distribution where the base system only came with nano instead of standard editors, I was very confused (and very disappointed that this whas what they'd come up with as a "friendly" interface).
well, like the parent of my comment said, nano is a lot easier to use than vim or emacs. nano is much more like DOS edit or stuff like that. there are many memes about not being able to quit Vim, etc
Ease of use. When it comes to coding I prefer a GUI as well.
I used Vim when I first installed Linux. It was painful but I used it. I found Nano and I stopped using Vim. No comparison in usability.
yeah Vim takes a lot of effort to learn. Like any advanced tool. I will 100% always fire up nano when in a hurry. but i like trying to learn Vim as an exercise (in torture? idk haha)
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Does nano have LSP support?
I dont know what that acronym means. I just use nano as a basic text editor, its automatically showing me different colours XML now. I have used it as a text editor for code before, but if i knew i was going to be coding lots, id look at others like vim and emacs. Me using it is a result of it being the quickest tool to get the job done at the time 'efficiently' and i know there are more powerful ones out there.
If I had to guess they're on about the "language server protocol"
Yeah
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Ed Is The Standard Text Editor
ik
Back in the early 2000s I met some guy who had once sold a copy of edit.exe to some store as if it were some software he had written for managing orders and inventory. The folks at the store used windows, but they would open up edit.exe and it looked just like the stuff that the larger store chains used to manage their own orders... The guy just made a sample file and instructed them how to input data in a specific format that made it all look like a table, but it was just a text file with no validation of any kind.
Still, a template can be immensely useful
i edit all my html in an actual physical notebook like a civilised person
wish i could find my old notepads full of BASIC and HTML lol
as a matter of fact many of my batch and basic thingies were made on the margins of my history notebooks
Helix!
I use helix btw
a fellow man of ~~culture~~ "why even bother with that theyre just text editors" i see
Nah. I was so annoyed by how primitive editors are that I started writing my own one, that would allow me to seamlessly traverse the AST of the code, rather than being stuck on the low abstraction levels of characters, words and paragraphs. After a bunch of misery making tree-sitter work with Haskell, and using it for a while, I stumbled upon Helix. It is pretty much my idea but faster and working well.
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I use emacs with evil, best of both worlds
Doom Emacs gang😎
ed master race
ed is the standard editor
Viitor and emacsitor aren't even words
I remember using Notepad for a long time for coding in Windows. Then I was introduced to UltraEdit. It was cool, but expensive. Jumped onto NotePad++ and I've been enjoying it lots.
I do also use IDEs, usually Codium based.
edlin was my favorite for a long time 🙂
Edlin is a line editor, and the only text editor provided with early versions of IBM PC DOS,[1] MS-DOS and OS/2.[2] Although superseded in MS-DOS 5.0 and later by the full-screen MS-DOS Editor, and by Notepad in Microsoft Windows, it continues to be included in the 32-bit versions of current Microsoft operating systems.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edlin
edit: link and explanation of syntax used if anyone is interested. the w (write) and q (quit) commands made it somewhat similar to VI(M). https://www.computerhope.com/edlin.htm
why did i never see it on my 32bit winxp then
Were you using Windows XP Home, by any chance?
That tool was only included with Windows XP Professional, and even then, it was a command-line utility—so unless you were specifically looking for it or browsing through the %windir%\system32 directory, you probably wouldn’t have noticed it.
The article I referenced didn’t specify exactly which 32-bit versions it came with or when it was removed—it just mentioned that it was still included in 32-bit Windows after the DOS era. I didn’t write the article myself, so I can’t really speak to its accuracy.
Personally, I used that edline a lot back in the DOS days starting around 1985, until I switched to Notepad in Windows 95 and later to VIM when I moved to Linux after Windows 98. I never really checked for it in newer versions of Windows after that. A quick Google search confirmed it wasn’t included in XP Home, which would explain why you never saw it.
Link to the forum I found this information about XP in: http://murc.ws/forum/hardware/general-hardware-software/49698-omg-edlin-still-lives-in-xp#post755768
(edit: fixed a typo, added reference link)
OHHHHH THAT EXPLAINS IT
yes im a home user
Finally someone mentions edlin! Real programmers don’t need to see more than a single line at a time.
that is absolutely true and also 640Kb RAM should be enough for everyone 😂
all the hours and countless reboots spent optimizing config.sys and autoexec.bat to achieve 50kb more of available memory... good memories 🙂
i just moved my files off to an external drive whenever my hdd got full haha
i didnt really trust my coding skills enough to come close to config.sys...
micro ftw
I keep finding new features. Tabs. Hsplit. Plugins. Authentication prompt at save time if it detects that the user you ran it under doesn't have permission to write to that file.
And of course keybinds that make a dang lick of sense.
Micro ftw!
(I also use Geany, Featherpad, Vim, ee(1), and JOE)
I use KDE Kate for my coding. Scripting more accurately to some users, but I don't find a meaningful distinction.
gedit gang
cat <<EOF gang
yeee
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