Unironically? Maybe not. But using something ironically is still using it.

They hate’us cause they anus.

Vim: Clearly evil, lightning fast. Relies on vimscript for any interactivity and can barely be used outside of the editor.

I don’t know why you want use Vimscript for anything outside of the editor. But if that your issue, then there is Neovim. It uses Lua instead Vimscript, but what is the benefit of using Lua outside of Vim? That changes nothing.

Nano is the tool that people use when they don’t have a need for TUI editors in general and therefore don’t want to have to memorize how people with teletypes decided things should have been done 75 years ago and who also don’t want to get dragged into endless pointless bickering arguments about which set of greybeards was objectively right about their sets of preferences.

I’m glad people enjoy the editors they use and also I just wanna change a single fuckin line in a config file every once in a while without needing to consult a reference guide.

How about micro

Bruh 😂 the Emacs user community absolutely constantly shit on Vim users. When they added Vi(m) bindings they literally named it ‘evil mode’, and they constantly make fun of people who use it, and spacemacs, and the latest flavor of (neo)vi(m), and all the extensions necessary to make vim halfway useful as an ide, etc etc etc.

Once again proving that the easiest way to work out how to do something in vim is to post something along the lines of “vim sucks because it can’t do x” online :)

Sadly I don’t remember. Sometimes it comes preinstalled, sometimes not, depending on OS or something. (Maybe Manjaro gnome). I could copy and paste inside of vim, but not to/from outside vim.

So I need to dive into the manual to do something as basic and universal as “copy and paste”? Why not make it Ctrl+shift+c or have it shown in the info text when pressing this almost universally accepted keypairs? Or at least make it somewhat similar to this. I find it bonkers why some programs decide to just have radically different shortcuts or defaults, the complete opposite of what feels intuitive. Same with the design of some doors that need actual SIGNS on them to tell you which direction they open. Just bad design choice.

Edit: just remembered. Same story with tmux. Want to copy something? Surprise, it’s not anything you expect it to be. Some ctrl+b + [ or some shit

Uh, just trying non-modal vim for the first time and… how do I quit it? I can’t :q.

<img alt="" src="https://media1.tenor.com/m/X2w2_BDKEJIAAAAC/drink-spray.gif">

Ctrl-q and then if it asks to save, type “no, fuck you”

VScodium is FOSS though

?

Integrated Mevelopment Environment. You should have known this

The M stands for beefcake

That acronym usually stands for “Input Method Editor” and describes the program that makes people able to type east Asian characters with a usual keyboard.

日本語は楽しいです。

Integrated Memeing Environment

It was a joke to make the point that vim can be the easiest tool to use if you are trying to do a complex task.

It is easier after you learn basics. Learning is not easy, but usage is.

This makes it seem like jerking off to MILF porn is hard because there is a learning curve

Every day in my case, except holidays.

Yes it’s so outdated that mostly every IDE offers usage with its keybindings.

You seem to believe that people only use the terminal if they HAVE to. I doubt anybody these days HAS to type any amount of code in the terminal, but choose to anyway. Like probably anyone else I have access to modern tools and infrastructure, but I choose to do work in the terminal because I’m more productive there. I use (neo)vim because I like it more than any other text editor I’ve used, and have no problem writing code and debugging in the terminal.

I actually use VIM bindings in PyCharm, slightly cursed but actually works really well and meshes fairly nicely with the other IDE shortcuts. Being able to use it in any terminal is a nice bonus.

VIM may have been a very useful tool 20 or 30 years ago, but today it’s nothing else but a tool for one’s sense of superiority. It’s the vinyl of editors.

So, because you don’t understand something, it’s outdated?

If you have to type that much code in a terminal, your infrastructure is outdated. Simple as that.

Ok, I can see you have no idea what you’re talking about.

Great, now the next time I’ll use nano I surely will forget about this and get frustrated when trying to save a file with Ctrl+O

I’m thinking Ctrl+C quits and Ctrl+S is scroll lock is that correct?

And all the shortcuts are SANE, not the weird thing of nano

You can have mouse support with nano. Alt-m toggles it on or off.

Or you can preinstall micro like you preinstall everything else 😅

It’s not that simplle or user friendly when none of the usual shortcuts work. C-a did something completely unexpected.

What’s with this childish rant?!

Because you want to get out of your Stockholm syndrome?

oohh that is nice, I think I’ll swap my nano to that.

Its GNUI

Oh it’s about speed. What’s the one that get your brain to be faster at programming? I use 4 fingers typing and am still typing much faster than I can think.

Seems you have a little typo, Emacs, Arch, and C

I regularly fix my bashrc file with Notepad. I run it in Wine because I cbf to RealVNC from my Windows CE media server.

(n.b: None of this is real, I wrote it to upset people, I’m sorry)

Not even Basic Command-Count-motion like c3w aka change 3 words after cursor, or d3b delete 3 words before the cursor?

To that, you add the D aka delete command C for change Y for yank (copy)

So yy to yank line, or dd to delete line.

Also p for paste

Also, i sends you before the cursor, a sends you after. Capital I is insert at beginning of line, Capital A is insert at end of line (append).

I terms of motions and moving around, you need: hjkl, C-d and C-u (half page jumps down and up), and within the line: 0 or ^ for beginning of line, $ for end (taken from regex), w for moving by word forwards, b for moving by word backwards. That’s pretty much all you need imo. There is also t and f. Where t goes forwards (think 'till aka until). Like dtc delete until the c character. F is the same but goes backwards in the line rather than forwards. Remember you can use these with xommands, so d$ deletes until the end of the line. Or “dt.” deletes till the “.” so… yeahI know there’s more, but that’s all you need for Normal and Insert mode imo.

For Visual mode, you only need to know how the Visual modes work. Visual (v), Visual Line (Shift-v) and Visual Block (Ctrl-V).

Also, for visual mode, it might be helpful to learn how to use V-Block to comment out multiple lines at once. Can’t be bothered to go into it.

But I’d argue that’s all there is to learn about vim keys in terms of getting work done.

I’m a vim user and I would say it’s not. It’s very powerful, but only once you become familiar with the commands.

Nano is a better default for the average user because it works in a way most users would expect for a text editor to work.

Honestly, these days it’s pretty simple. The thing you need to remember is that you do not need to know EVERYTHING all at once. Learn a little bit, use it, keep what you use, discard what you don’t, get it in muscle memory, and learn a bit more. Very quickly you’ll be zooming through vim.

You can learn the basics, and go from there- the basics of vim (which imo everyone should know- vi is often the fallback editor), and then you can just casually learn stuff as you go.

Here’s the basics for modern default/standard vim: Arrow keys move you around like you expect in all ‘modes’ (there’s some arguments about if you should be using arrow keys in the vim community- for now, consider them a crutch that lets you learn other things). There’s two ‘modes’- command mode, and edit mode.

Edit mode acts like a standard, traditional text editor, though a lot of your keybinds (e.g. ctrl-c/ctrl-v) don’t work.

Press escape to go back into command mode (in command mode, esc does nothing- esc is always safe to use. If you get lost/trapped/are confused, just keep hitting escape and you’ll drop into command mode). You start vim in command mode. Press i to go into edit mode at your current cursor position.

To exit vim entirely, go to command mode (esc), and type :wq<enter>.

‘:’ is ‘issue command string’,

‘w’ is ‘write’, aka save,

‘q’ is quit.

In other words, ‘:wq’ is ‘save and quit’

‘:q’ is quit without saving, ‘:w’ is save and don’t quit. Logical.

Depending on your terminal, you can probably select text with your mouse and have it be copied and then pasted with shift-ins in edit mode, which is a terminal thing and not a vim thing, because vim ties into it natively.

That gets you started with basically all the same features as nano, except they work in a minimal environment and you can build them up to start taking advantage of command mode, which is where the power and speed of vim start coming into play.

For example ‘i’ puts you in edit mode on the spot- capital i puts you in command mode at the beginning of the line. a is edit mode after your spot- capital A is edit mode at the end of the current line.

Do you need these to use vim? Nope. Once you learn them, start using them, and have them as muscle memory, is it vastly faster to use? Yes. And there’s hundreds of keybinds like that, all of which are fairly logical once you know the logic behind them- ‘insert’ and ‘after’ for i/a, for example.

Fair warning, vim is old enough that the logic may seem arcane sometimes- e.g. instead of ‘copy and paste’ vim has ‘yank and put,’ because copy/paste didn’t exist yet, so the keybinds for copy/paste are y and p.

Vim makes it easy to edit text in complicated ways, once you’ve learned it.

Vim is not easy to learn nor intuitive.

It is simple and compounding.

You might not ever edit enough text to ever need to learn a new skillset to edit text. If that’s the case, use nano.

But if you do find yourself editing a lot of text, consider trying vimtutor.

It takes 20 minutes and you’ll be proficient enough to match nano’s efficiency ceiling.

You can learn Emacs in one day. Every day.

VIM is like drugs. Easy to start, hard to quit.

My fingers don’t speak it is the problem.

haha, same. do you use vimium as well?

Can you use a mouse in nano? I always just use the arrow keys, or page up/down and home/end

I mostly use vim but I barely use the jkl; to navigate the document.

M-x M-c butterfly

<file foobar

storage/documents/programs ro
> echo puts "hello world" > main.rb

storage/documents/programs ro via rb
> ls
c  js  main.rb  python

storage/documents/programs ro via rb
> < main.rb grep hello
puts hello world

storage/documents/programs ro via rb
>

cat pipeing is safer though.

foobar > file and your file is gone.

Nah, win can have it.

What if there is no correct answer?

There are dozens of us!

nah you’re wrong

ln -sf /bin/nano /bin/vi

Just tried it in my terminal and I couldn’t exit, lol

Edit a file, writing a quick shell script or whatever in the terminal. Nano is great. I don’t see any use in learning vim or emacs. If I need something more I’m going use a gui editor anyway.

Don’t get triggered anyone it’s just my preference

ohh yeahh then nano

A similar argument is what finally caused the value of the vi family of editors to click in my brain:

They are designed to be fully functional over even the shittiest possible* remote connection. You can’t always count on ctrl, alt, or even the arrow keys being transmitted in a way that is understood by the remote machine.

*Well, I guess the worst possible terminal would be something like an actual teletype, and in that case you’d probably want to fall back to ed or its descendants. To save paper, if nothing else.

Using X forwarding would require you to install big chunks of GNOME or KDE on the server. A better approach is to mount the remote server over SFTP then use KWrite, gedit, whatever, directly on your desktop.

In any KDE app you can connect with SFTP in the open file dialog. Just type sftp://user@server/path and you can browse/open/edit files the remote server. ssh keys+agent make things a lot easier here obviously.

true but i dont like how they are forced togther so i use featherpad

You mean my 6k Gmail drafts? 😭

I started doing paper pads everywhere and trying to log at end of day.

Not in rescue mode. If you can’t mount your root partition because something was fudged in /etc/fstab, for example, you may be stuck in recovery and depending on your distribution, it may not have nano in that minimalist mode.

For me it also happens when I install a VM of Debian using the small image, on my dedicated server in a data center. The company hosting the server requires a special network configuration and AFAIK, there’s only vi. So i need to use the console to access the VM and from there, edit /etc/network/something with vi to setup the network. Once done I can reboot and install the rest of the software over the network, including nano.

I’ve been using Linux for more than two decades. Before nano I was using pico, but it also required to have pine/alpine installed. So knowing the basics of vi has often been helpful over the years for me.

Maybe it’s because I like tinkering with VMs and SBCs, and most people will not encounter situations where they don’t have nano, but it can happen. And you’ll be glad to know at least “i” and “:wq!”.

In a professional context, you might end up on servers that don’t have nano installed, but do have vi. Or if you’re helping out a friend on their laptop, they might not have the same software as you. Or if you often end up tinkering with random devices and/or setting up new systems it might be tedious to install the same applications every time.

It’s basically an argument for learning the very basics of the most common editors so you have flexibility no matter where you end up. Even when you have the ability to download and install your preferred software, it’s still an extra step that might not be desirable for a variety of reasons. But if it’s just your own personal device, I see no problem with just installing whatever you prefer and running with it.

EDIT: Personally, I find that I don’t end up using those other editors often enough to remember the abstruse commands of tools like vim, so I’m not worried about it. When it does happen, 99% of the time I can just whip out a smartphone and look up the directions for the n-dozenth time.

you can change that really easily

Same. Stage 1 install will forever be a core memory for me.

Not necessarily! I always run ln -s ‘/usr/bin/$EDITOR’ $(which $EDITOR) after a fresh install, so I have a valid executable on the path called $EDITOR.

Of course, then I have to make sure to add export EDITOR=\$EDITOR to my .bashrc. (Obviously.)

and sometimes you just need a text editor, not an entire thesaurus

Meanwhile I can just use the same shortcuts every other program made in the last 40 years uses. Ctrl+Q to quit, Ctrl+S to save, Ctrl+Z for undo. If I wanted to consult a cheatsheet to relearn keyboard shortcuts, I’ll use vim and emacs.

a text editor that has a tutor because it’s been around for so long and it’s had so many years to establish itself with an outside control interface that’s quite literally about as optimal as it can be. Vim basically allows you to never move your hands away from the homerow keys, even when navigating and doing bulk edits. The sheer amount of gained speed and productivity you get from this combined with the amount of times you’ll have to deal with text editing throughout your life is probably going to outweight any potential learned annoyances.

I remember looking up how to use Colemak with vim, and the advice was:

• Change the mappings so the position is the same, but it has the downside that every tutorial won’t match.
• Keep the mappings and do awkward stretches for common functions like up and down.

So I just gave up and moved on.

that is a potential problem, though im sure there’s a vim user somewhere that’s fixed it with a bind set.

helix-editor.com

essentially a terminal modal editor (like vim), but instead of specifying the action to perform then what to perform the action on (like “yank 3 lines”), in helix you select first, then perform actions on the selection (like “these 3 lines, i want them yanked”). it’s slightly better (according to others) because you get to see what you’re going to change in the file so you don’t accidentally delete 5 lines instead of deleting 4.

on top of that many features are builtin, like tree-sitter and lsp support, so you don’t have to spend 5 hours looking for cool plugins and configuring everything to get started (my config file is only 50 lines of toml).

the downside is that there isn’t support for plugins (yet), but there’s already things like a file picker, more than 100 themes etc.

the death of Atom

I’m still in mourning.

I simply have too much vim config and muscle memory to ever leave vim

I’m trapped in a prison of my own making!

Fwiw, you can change the shortcuts for nano in your ~/.nanorc. Most of mine are the same as standard desktop editors, except undo is Ctrl+U because Ctrl+Z is commonly bound to suspend, and quit is Alt+Q instead of Ctrl+Q because in browser window terminals (e.g. Unraid) Ctrl+Q usually closes the whole browser (oof).