A Month With Nano - A Vim User's Perspective

Today I talk about my month with the nano text editor.
👇 PULL IT DOWN FOR THE GOOD STUFF 👇

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==== Time Stamps ====
0:00 Intro
1:02 The Positives
2:57 Configuration is Easy
5:03 It Themes Well...Kinda
5:50 The Negatives...That Are Not Negatives
9:07 I Miss Modes
12:17 Syntax Highlighting
16:03 The Keybindings
18:57 My Thoughts
22:53 Will I Keep Using Nano?
24:04 Wrapping Up

#nano #vim #thelinuxcast

[chrisMuc]

A bigger challenge would be to use vi for a month.

[TActually]

LMAO, I appreciate your objectivity. For a WM user who lives in the terminal, I think vim/neovim makes more sense for you. But as a person with a DE (Plasma), I only use nano to edit config files, but do all my scripting and programming in kate or vscode.

[rich]

Looking back, I think my biggest complaint with nano used to be that it was not always installed on a server I would be asked to look at, and you can't always go ahead and install everything you want on someone else's server. Vim would pretty much always be there, because it was a sysadmin favourite.

Now I rarely if ever see a server without nano on it, which makes my life that much easier. I've seen people do amazing things with vim, but it really seems you need to spend time to make it behave exactly the way you want it.

[Bruces-Eclectic-World]

Loved this video and I think you were as sincere as you could be. You were very objective for the most part and I'm proud of you! So go and have some alone time/snuggle time with Vim... 🤣
The look on your face when you said that was the best part of my day. So Thanks... 🤪

LLAP 🖖

[BaronBSOfficial]

"Nano it is not Vim!"
- Cast, The Linux 2023

[patrickprucha]

shift and arrow is a standard gui method of capturing text. For those like us, this is so super fast to delete, cut and paste and move there any where else.

[patrickprucha]

Currently, i use MC with Nano as a means of working on my scripts or libraries. People say you can't open multiple files with nano, but you can and then alt-tab to move from one document to the next. I don't have to create and remember so many keybindings. I have big script files in it and move between between documents very easily.

I think it comes down to choosing an application, learn the app, and become an expert. Nano, helps me get things done.
Cheers
Patrick

[lqlarry]

To me, Nano is like a plumber working out of his trunk vs Vim, which is like a plumber working out of a work truck. Both can get the job done but the plumber with the work truck will have the right tool for the job.

[Mano]

Will you do a nixos video soon? It has gotten a lot of atention lately and i was thinking of giving it a try even though i need to waste a lot of time to learn how to write the configuration file😅

[whiskeylinux]

I started with vim but settled on nano. I'm no coder or writer, and never had a need for all of vim's features.

[CristianMolina]

I use micro for my terminal editor needs and it's good enough. Maybe if you want to compare vim with something more modern I'd go with Kakoune or even Helix.

[rmccombs]

Some version on vi is almost always available on any Unix like system. In 1990 I was in college and the replaced a VAX running VMS with a HP 9000/850 running HPUX and we had to learn vi.

[MeriaDuck]

The sacrifice 🤣

Been using vi/vim/nvim since 1995, vim plugins in every IDE I use.

[OktayAcikalin]

Kind of reminds me of Gimp is not Photoshop. The "dispute", my wife and I have. I've literally grown up using Gimp. My wife has grown up with Photoshop. Now her MBA broke, and she got a Lenovo with elementary OS and Gimp. Yeah, she can't get herself to learn Gimp. It's very frustrating...

[pradnyeshmate]

thank you man you're the best you're really helpful for me learning linux i just installed i3 wm on my pc although i'm using a unixporn theme though do you think it's not good and i should start and configure my system from scratch

[stevet]

First of all, another excellent video. Keep them coming.

So I'm not a programmer or coder or what ever. I'm just your average everyday user. I am looking for something for writing (books and what not) I don't like open/Libre office since it has so much stuff going on. I do like nano and have used nvim. What is a suggestion for writing prose that is keyboard and terminal based? I have heard that markdown is a good "language" with vim. Does nano have markdown support with live preview?

[miallo]

I have been a (neo-)vim user for 10 years and I would never want to miss it. That being said: I would not recommend it to everyone. It takes a lot of learning and tinkering, which is perfectly fine if 90% of your work is getting paid for typing. But if you just sometimes write a couple of lines then I think the overhead is just too big.
One for the laughs of the old "How to exit vim"-meme: whenever I am on a computer where EDITOR=nano I am seriously struggling :D (okay over time I am slowly getting it, but I am still "thinking in vim")

[KillTheFace]

"Nano is not Vim" how could you say something so controversial yet brave

[jamesford]

I really don't understand the need for either on a routine basis. I run Linux 100% of the time for over 3 years, and have opened a text editor maybe 5-6 times total in those 42 months and once was to build an rsync script for a chron job and 2nd time was to modify that script. so outside of that maybe 4 times in nearly 4 years. Nano, xed etc all work just fine for me

[curtprasky]

This was amusing. The very first thing I do with a freshly installed Linux distro is to open a terminal and type in "which vim". Nowadays, the second thing I do is to install vim (usually). I was absolutely shocked the first time I installed a Linux distro (Ithink it was Fedora) and typed vim <somefile> and got the response "command not found". It felt like I had stepped on a step that wasn't there, a momentary panic. And the third thing I do is to remove the nano package, because I have no use whatsoever for it. Which is a little strange, because when I first came across something resembling nano it was way back in the day shortly after I got my very first computer equipped with a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive, a three 3 1/2 inch floppy drive a, whopping 64 meg HD AND....wait for it...a 1200 baud modem. I almost forgot to mention, I also had a whole meg of RAM! As soon as I felt I had the basics of running this machine with DOS 3.0 OS, I signed up for a dial-up internet account and found myself logging onto a Unix server. The editor that came with the Unix email program was something called Pico which is, I believe, the editor that inspired nano. I fumbled around with that for a while until I got used to it. I began browsing Usenet for info on computers and kept reading about different posters favorite text editor vi. I of course had access to that through my dialup and gave it a try and spent about a week fighting with vi and never got to the point where I could consistently use it at all. I'd end up with documents with sentences that abruptly ended mid-line, random blocks of text pasted into it that had nothing to do with what I wanted to say, etc. So I gave up and went back to Pico, wondering how anyone could possibly make use of an atrocity like vi. It was a few years before I finally heard about Linux around 1993 or 4 or thereabouts. I had already graduated to a better machine and was running Windows 3.1 and decided to give Linux a try. I bought a book, The Linux Bible, which came with a cd to install Caldera openLinux and dove in. I ran that for a while and then moved to Slackware, which is when I finally got around to using vim, and I thanked God for the vimtutor. Once I spent a little while with the vimtutor, I was able to use vim with no problem and have been using it ever since and I can't believe the difficulties I had with vi.