The image is misleading. The brain sizes represent the amount of grey matter it takes to operate the editor. The nano guy has plenty of brain power left over for things like hygiene, breathing and basic reasoning.

Vim users: "I feel bad for you"

Nano users: "I don't think about you at all"

I do appreciate this in nano. It helps me complete the new container config occasionally required to install vim.

Never ceases to amaze me how people get so exercised over a text editor.

nano gang represent😎

micro enters the chat.

Static, portable binary with no dependencies.

Out of the box:

• Syntax highlighting
• Multi-line cursors like Sublime Text
• Mouse support (works incredibly well)
• Splits and tabs for working on multiple files
• Diff gutter
• Copy and paste with system clipboard
• Cross-platform (runs basically on anything that Go does)
• Sane key binds (ctrl-s, ctrl-c, ctrl-v, ctrl-z, ctrl-x, etc)
• Terminal emulator
• Plugin system to extend it
• And much much more

I have nothing to do with the project but this binary is the absolute best. curl or wget to any host and away you go with effectively a Sublime Text / VSCode like in the terminal. It’s as simple as nano and as functional as a well configured and extended vim.

It’s baffling it’s not more well known and not installed by default on major distros.

I love nano. I used to do tech support for a Linux-based content management system (before SAaS take took off).. The customer sysadmins were sometimes whichever engineer was volun-told to do it, so competency varied wildly.

I helped mostly with installs. This might be the poor newbie sysadmin's first time on the command line. Nano was my go-to suggestion for editing config files--all the commands are right there! Much less intimidating than vi or emacs for a newbie.

nano is just a text editor, I use it as a text editor, it has keybindings on screen by default, no need to config or memorise, why bother? (for text editing, not whatever people use vim or emacs for)

I use micro. It's 1000x better.

Honestly nano is perfect for quick edits. Vim and Emacs are powerful, but sometimes you just want to open a config file, change one line, and exit without fighting the editor. 😄

I use Helix btw

I used some distro with vim back in the day and I just kept using it. I lose my shit when I use something with just nano and my muscle memory tries to do a vim thing.

Some real talk.

Can we just include the 4 most popular text editors on basic systems??

Like i wanna scream when there isnt my text editor installed on a lightweight distro.

Vi Emacs Micro Nano

For context,

Debian ships with nano and vi Openwrt only ships with nano

Like cant we just include small editors. In a perfect world i would want neovim installed. But i understand its larger and has alot more dependency's.

So having VI isnt as good but im willing to be reasonable.

JUST INCLUDE VI

the reason i learned vim is because VI is installed by default on almost every distro.

Im tempted to try emacs tho

I don't get why there's so much prejudice towards nano users in the Linux community, people act like nano is useless but it performs its job well, and it does it without being large or overly complicated.

Kate users:

Nano or as I like to call it "The Sudo Editor"

nano is usually built in. Adding another one is just redundant if all you're using it for is editing an occasional config file.

Honestly never understood the hate for it. Who cares? Petty, stupid, nerd-wars over little crap like a text editor is the reason average people don't even consider linux.

Just use ed.

Ctrl+D. Easy.

My computer my choice

Meanwhile in an alternate universe, two people argue about edit vs edlin… 😆

Linux text editor discourse has been baffling to me for decades now. I don't care which you use, and I care even less about why.