Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Thursday, 19-Jun-2025 15:24:01 JST pistolero

   • Mr. Bacon
   @Tony
   
   > what do you use?
   
   Most of the time, acme. Sometimes I use ed or vi, but if I use vi, it's usually nvi or busybox's vi. I actually like ed.
   
   > I've used others but nano is just easiest.
   
   I think nano is still really popular with sysadmins. A lot of sysadmins I know use it.
   
   > idk, i used vim for awhile because people on here were getting all hard about it,
   
   Anyone trying to push their text editor is an asshole because it really doesn't matter. I switched to vi back in the day when you started with pico rather than nano (which started its own life as a GPL clone of pico); emacs was comically bloated and the editor asked a lot of the user. vim is nowadays more bloated (and somehow slower) than emacs was back then. I used vim for years.
   
   I will say, you know, there are things that you'll have a much better time with: you want something simple (so it doesn't steal any cycles from your brain), you want something responsive (as close to zero lag as possible), and you want something that fits into your environment because otherwise the editor tries to subsume the environment. nano is like an extremely light emacs, so if you want to try something similar, probably joe or uemacs.
   
   And then, speaking of uemacs, if you look at programmers, the closer they get to being legendary, the simpler their editors are. Ken Thompson uses sam and ed, Arthur Whitney was using (according to his friend) notepad.exe, Linus Torvalds uses uemacs (which is his privately maintained fork of an extremely stripped-down emacs from the 90s), dmr used acme, Rob Pike used acme, Chuck Moore used a little editor he wrote himself for DOS. The hard part of this shit isn't moving the words on the screen around; better to not make it complicated.
   • Embed this notice
     di0nysius the patomskyite (dsm@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Saturday, 21-Jun-2025 02:18:38 JST di0nysius the patomskyite

     in reply to

     • Mr. Bacon
     @Tony @p Ctrl+Shift+C/V is baked in now that Ctrl+C is "Stop!" mentally.
     pistolero and pwm like this.
   • Embed this notice
     Mr. Bacon (tony@clew.lol)'s status on Saturday, 21-Jun-2025 02:18:39 JST Mr. Bacon

     in reply to
     @p Yah, that's true.
     
     I don't really write code very often and when I do, I'm usually editing in VS Code so I don't even use a text editor for that. So, for me, it comes done to mainly using a text editor to change config files or maybe adjust one or two lines of code
     
     And yah, you're right about the simplistic side of it. Like all i really want is to be able to click click, copy/paste, scroll, ect. Even nano is a little weird about copy/paste though. The one thing I am a little annoyed about is nano doesn't use CTRL C CTRL V - but that's also just my google brain talking lol.
     pistolero likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Saturday, 21-Jun-2025 08:08:10 JST pistolero

     in reply to

     • Mr. Bacon
     @Tony
     
     > The one thing I am a little annoyed about is nano doesn't use CTRL C CTRL V - but that's also just my google brain talking lol.
     
     Microsoft. All the keyboards in the world had the Control key to the left of A: Microsoft moved it to the lower-left corner in order to make Wordstar's keybindings inconvenient, and then moved the common editor keys in Word to the bottom row. You've probably never heard of Wordstar; guess if the tactic was successful. If you have ever wondered why a commonly used meta-key is as far as possible from the other keys and why Caps-Lock is right there occupying such a useful spot, you have your answer.
     
     Most Unix editors started with Unix-layout keyboards; look at old Sun or DEC keyboards. So the keys are mapped to work well with that, and now nobody has those keyboards (except people that buy the HHKB from PFU Ltd.) but the keys remain.
     ✙ dcc :pedomustdie: :phear_slackware: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Mr. Bacon (tony@clew.lol)'s status on Saturday, 21-Jun-2025 08:15:00 JST Mr. Bacon

     in reply to

     • di0nysius the patomskyite
     @dsm @p brb lemme search "Ctrl + W"
     
     Like what the hell man. Whatever lol, still simple enough
     pistolero likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Mr. Bacon (tony@clew.lol)'s status on Saturday, 21-Jun-2025 08:44:51 JST Mr. Bacon

     in reply to
     @p interesting. I literally never knew or thought about that lol.
     
     Another reason to hate microsoft.
     pistolero likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Saturday, 21-Jun-2025 08:48:20 JST pistolero

     in reply to

     • Mr. Bacon
     @Tony Yeah, the VT100 was pretty popular until the Tektronix came out (my view of the things that occurred before I was born is shrouded somewhat) have a look at the keyboard:
     dec_vt100.jpg
     ✙ dcc :pedomustdie: :phear_slackware: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Saturday, 21-Jun-2025 08:53:35 JST pistolero

     in reply to

     • Mr. Bacon
     @Tony That one's pretty weird. Have a look at the 220, the ASR Model 33 Teletype (the reason for /dev/tty's name), etc.
     vt220-keyboard.jpg
     tektronix-4105-kb.JPG
     43338835-de3ca1d6-91d7-11e8-9c27-c25215bd6428-144597225.jpg
     space-cadet_keyboard_5-3160126609.jpg
     ibm-battleship.jpg
     teletype-model-33.jpg
     tektronix-kb-with-dial.jpg
     ✙ dcc :pedomustdie: :phear_slackware: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Kirino Kousaka (kirino@shitpost.cloud)'s status on Saturday, 21-Jun-2025 09:24:20 JST Kirino Kousaka

     in reply to

     • Mr. Bacon
     Almost bought one of those bad boys a few years back!
     pistolero likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Saturday, 21-Jun-2025 09:25:04 JST pistolero

     in reply to

     • Mr. Bacon
     • Kirino Kousaka
     @Kirino @Tony You find one in working order and they are like $10k on the electronic bay.
   • Embed this notice
     Kirino Kousaka (kirino@shitpost.cloud)'s status on Saturday, 21-Jun-2025 09:27:12 JST Kirino Kousaka

     in reply to

     • Mr. Bacon
     Let me correct myself.
     
     Made one of worst financial decisions possible a few years back!
     pistolero likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Saturday, 21-Jun-2025 09:27:53 JST pistolero

     in reply to

     • Mr. Bacon
     • Kirino Kousaka
     @Kirino @Tony It's the meme terminal so everyone wants it.
   • Embed this notice
     Kirino Kousaka (kirino@shitpost.cloud)'s status on Saturday, 21-Jun-2025 09:32:02 JST Kirino Kousaka

     in reply to

     • Mr. Bacon
     I didn't know :O
     
     I remember I wanted to get an old terminal because I was getting obsessed with reading John Titor's posts and wanted to buy an IBM 5100. Couldn't find one of those but I saw a VT 100 in my searches!
     pistolero likes this.