Fedora Developers Restart Talk Over Using Nano As The Default Text Editor

[stormcrow]

Why are we trying to make things all easy for people on the command line.

You asked for it - you opened a shell. You got the power. Now learn to use it, young apprentice.

This is like giving young skywalker a water pistol.

Arguably, had Obi Wan not given Luke his father's lightsaber he might have listened to Yoda and not run off and get his arm cut off by Vader because he literally didn't know what he was doing. A novice padawan trying to fight a Sith lord who is an experienced combat warrior and swordsman is going to end badly for the padawan 100% of the time. A squirt gun or wooden baton would have been preferable at Luke's skill level. The default for new padawans was no light saber because the weapon was too dangerous to use for anyone without at least some advanced level of competence, force weilding maturity, and physical training. (Yes, I'm a nerd.)

Likewise, don't give a novice user a tool he's likely to shoot himself in the foot with. There's a reason why many modern "rm" commands will refuse to honor "rm -rf /" by default.

I really don't care either way. Safe initial defaults are preferable. Changing the variable is trivial. The people that know what they're doing are usually less likely to shoot themselves in the foot also know how to alter the default editor variable. If not, they at least know the right question to ask to look it up. Likewise, as others have mentioned, a simple script with sane choices on initial boot after installation (or during) is also a good idea.

I think it speaks volumes in 2020 about the state of the computer industry that we haven't been able to move on from UI paradigms that were first designed and coded when computer cores were behemoths that took up entire rooms or floors of buildings and their computational interface capabilities were taxed by generating text to remote users via 300 baud hard wired cables bigger than my thumb is in diameter from 50-60 years ago.

[JustinTurdeau]

nano: easy for the typical user; hard for the programmer.
Vim: easy for the programmer; hard for the typical user.

dte: easier than nano for the typical user and much more capable.

The forced meme of nano needs to end. Its only advantage is being ancient (and thus packaged and installed everywhere). There are at least a dozen better options that are just as small and much more useful.

[jacob]

Phoronix: Fedora Developers Restart Talk Over Using Nano As The Default Text Editor

Fedora developers are once again discussing a proposal on switching to Nano as the default text editor on Fedora systems...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...0-Default-Prop

Frankly am I the only one who doesn't understand the enduring love for vi? That software is utter garbage in every way possible. Its user interface was fine by f'ing 1972 standards, today it defies every bit of accumulated knowledge of good UI design as well as every convention expected by users (other than hardcode vi fans, that is). Plus it's so famous for its bugs that clones must explicitly and deliberately implement the same bugs to be compatible. I say, to the dustbin of history with it, and good riddance.

[chuckula]

Can we stop fighting about text editors and instead have a friendly conversation about a non-controversial topic?

How about systemd!

[ix900]

Frankly am I the only one who doesn't understand the enduring love for vi? That software is utter garbage in every way possible. Its user interface was fine by f'ing 1972 standards, today it defies every bit of accumulated knowledge of good UI design as well as every convention expected by users (other than hardcode vi fans, that is). Plus it's so famous for its bugs that clones must explicitly and deliberately implement the same bugs to be compatible. I say, to the dustbin of history with it, and good riddance.

No, you're not the only one. I won't use it unless there's literally no choice (always been that way; never liked it). Would even prefer if all copies were burned and removed from life. lol

All Fedora devs need to do is to give a choice. Let people who really want it to have it and give a list with other choices. They just won't. There's only one to rule them all by default. Everyone who doesn't want the default just uses whatever and that's fine too so they should stop thinking about it really and go fix bugs because there's plenty of those out there.

[JustinTurdeau]

That software is utter garbage in every way possible.

Yep. In vim, eval.c and the various other eval*.c files are about 25,000 lines of unmaintainable garbage. That's more code than the entirety of some other editors.

Even the neovim developers have barely scratched the surface of cleaning up the awfulness of the core codebase. They're mostly just heaping more and more features on the dung pile.

Its user interface was fine by f'ing 1972 standards, today it defies every bit of accumulated knowledge of good UI design as well as every convention expected by users (other than hardcode vi fans, that is)

It's a classic example of what happens when a codebase slowly evolves around someone's harebrained, ad-hoc ideas of how to solve a problem instead of having a clean and coherent design. It's irredeemable at this point.

[jacob]

No, you're not the only one. I won't use it unless there's literally no choice (always been that way; never liked it). Would even prefer if all copies were burned and removed from life. lol

All Fedora devs need to do is to give a choice. Let people who really want it to have it and give a list with other choices. They just won't. There's only one to rule them all by default. Everyone who doesn't want the default just uses whatever and that's fine too so they should stop thinking about it really and go fix bugs because there's plenty of those out there.

The "one to rule them all" approach is a necessary precondition to building a deliverable, documentable and supportable product. That of course does not preclude having dozens of various alternative editors in the repos, but there must be the one true editor that is guaranteed to always be present and personally I'm pretty convinced that that standard editor shouldn't be vi. I'm actually less and less convinced that for Fedora the standard shouldn't be a graphical editor like gedit.

[JustinTurdeau]

I'm actually less and less convinced that for Fedora the standard shouldn't be a graphical editor like gedit.

That doesn't cover the use case of remote editing over SSH (or a serial port) though. So you'd still need a default TUI editor.

[GDJacobs]

What a waste of time.

For anyone who thinks vim is difficult to use, meet my friends ed and teco.

[gnulinux82]

dte: easier than nano for the typical user and much more capable.

As a long-time (casual) nano user, dte seems really nice. There's no help bar at the bottom like nano, but most of the default bindings seem pretty obvious. It seems a lot more customizable too.