Does anyone know who had the bright idea to replace vi with nano as the standard text editor and why this became some sort of standard?
I really don't get it. Vi is unintuitive and unfamiliar to unix newebies, but at some point every even half-competent person on unix could use it enough to at least do simple config file changes. Plus, if you took time to learn it properly, you actually knew a quite capable editor. And the beginner unfriendliness could presumably have been mostly fixed, without much cost to existing expert users. For example by defaulting to some helpful status message how look at help and insert text (and have cursor keys and Ctrl-S etc. work as "expected" in insert mode). Or maybe a message "press Ctrl-D to enter newbie mode" that experienced vimers could just ignore but would provide CUA style keybindings and modeless editing to everyone else.
Instead now everyone has to deal with a new (and for proficient users really quite worthless) editor with its own set of completely bizarre keybindings (not emacs, not readline, not vi, not CUA), but none of the upsides that come with emacs or vi's idiosyncracies. Ctrl-O to save? WTF? Literally the only advantage over vi is that it displays some instructions at the bottom, albeit not in a form any real newbie would understand at all.
Nano (and by extension this) feel like the worst of all possible worlds -- what am I missing?
The logic I always thought was that if you are working at the console on a server and dealing with the default $EDITOR, you most likely are doing some kind of emergency maintenance. In this scenario, you want to throw the most gentle/easy-to-use editor at the user to ensure they don't accidentally overwrite a file or something else because they've been trying to bring prod back up all night and can't see straight.
If you use the box for more than 5 minutes a year, you'll probably change it to vim or whatever you prefer anyway.
I've just realized that nano was initially released in 1999! Apparently, they just copied pico key bindings, that was used as an extremely light editor.
For the rest, there is to me a cultural divide between a sysadmin/dev culture with abstract interfaces, specific key bindings and options, configuration files, ... and the thousands of people with various backgrounds that are learning tech today, including the console, just to do something using computers.
Micro is probably the best of both worlds. Try editing an admin file as a user and save.
I really don't get it. Vi is unintuitive and unfamiliar to unix newebies, but at some point every even half-competent person on unix could use it enough to at least do simple config file changes. Plus, if you took time to learn it properly, you actually knew a quite capable editor. And the beginner unfriendliness could presumably have been mostly fixed, without much cost to existing expert users. For example by defaulting to some helpful status message how look at help and insert text (and have cursor keys and Ctrl-S etc. work as "expected" in insert mode). Or maybe a message "press Ctrl-D to enter newbie mode" that experienced vimers could just ignore but would provide CUA style keybindings and modeless editing to everyone else.
Instead now everyone has to deal with a new (and for proficient users really quite worthless) editor with its own set of completely bizarre keybindings (not emacs, not readline, not vi, not CUA), but none of the upsides that come with emacs or vi's idiosyncracies. Ctrl-O to save? WTF? Literally the only advantage over vi is that it displays some instructions at the bottom, albeit not in a form any real newbie would understand at all.
Nano (and by extension this) feel like the worst of all possible worlds -- what am I missing?