Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake moving away from 'ed' in the first place, and some said that even 'ed' had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left punch cards.

Perhaps you're right...or perhaps the Encyclopaedia Galactica is a better tool for navigating the galaxy if you're willing to learn a trick or two about how to navigate it? No one ever argued that the Restaurant at the End of the Universe was the BEST restaurant, only that it was the one at the end.

*Ahem*

mcedit

under sung hero of easy tui text editors. [Has controls on screen.]

overlooked because it's part of mc, and thus does not show up in the text editor categories in package managers and websearches?

could do a similar THGTTG bit for it. ... or other parodies of other stuff... idk, my brain not conjuring such things with ease just now.

(And yes, I missed the reference, at first, too... Thought about responding with some contrived towel elaboration).

I understand why. People tried using vi/vim but couldn't figure out how to exit the app. On the other hand, with Emacs, you need to use 4 keystrokes to do anything. It does not surprise me why nano is way used by default.

Nano's used because it's easier to use, which means the user interface is more intuitive than the others who insist you hit a key before making an edit.

I like Nano; it lets me do what I need to do quickly, simply and efficiently.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in making text editors in the first place. And some said that even making operating systems had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have built computers at all.

I see Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy parody, I updoot

People don’t have to look up “how to exit nano”

It's there and it's easy. Most people don't use terminal text editors unless they are SSHing in a server, and they would only do that sporadically, so it makes no sense to become proficient in a complex text editor like vim or Emacs for that little use case.

Sidenote: personally, I learned vim once, and used it extensively every day for two years. I stopped using it for one year and was back to square one. Now I use vscode for everything... Even when I'm using SSH, because vscode supports SSH

It is preinstalled and does what it needs to do. What else can I ask for?

I'm ashamed to admit that, despite having read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy several times, my Vim elitist mindset made me miss the reference.

Sometimes you need a real good slice of humble pie to remember what's important in life.

Nano is to EMacs/Vim as Notepad is to Notepad++ or VSCode (Nano has features Notepad doesn't, but you get the point).

I don't do a ton of code editing directly on the CLI. I do things like change parameters in config files or open a file to read it quickly. If I'm doing more heavy editing, I'll use a GUI editor (with an SFTP extension if I'm working on a headless server). So programs like Vim and EMacs have never been useful for me.

To each their own (and I have all the respect for anyone who knows how to exit Vim without looking it up) but I'm guessing the majority of people have a similar experience.

I've wanted to move elsewhere for a long time, thing is I don't use nano for programming, I use it for config files. For programming I use an IDE, and every time I've tried leaving my IDE for emacs with a language server I find I just can't be bothered to set it up and learn it and make the move. Maybe because while I have some gripes with my current setup...they're very minor

I've used Vim, NeoVim, Micro, mg(1), JOE, and even MS Edit (both the original DOS version and the recent Rust clone). No matter how complex and tailored I wrote my config, though, the features I actually used were included in GNU nano and/or my command shell without any of the bugs, bloat, learning curve, or slop.

Using it as my default just makes sense.

oh no, not again.

ed is the standard text editor

Same reason people use notepad on windows. It's already installed on almost every distro

I'm in the "been working with Linux since the 90s" gang so I call vim vi and nano pico and when I started there was a coolness factor to be considered. I was incredibly uncool so I used whatever I wanted, including pico - I mean you used pine for email back in the day and the interface was nearly identical, so whatever.

But I did want to be at least a tiny bit cooler, so I learned vi in a fairly rudimentary fashion. I can edit, jump, delete, search, replace, copy and paste - oh, and I can exit. I've spent so much time using vi, that my brain doesn't even have to think about exiting, not even whether I want to write or not. It just happens like second nature. It's actually gotten to where nano seems unduly burdensome to me.

But really, I prefer an IDE for programming. CLI editors will always be for configuration files and shell scripts to me.