I spend a fair bit of time on Linux command lines, but I use a mix of different TUI and GUI editors (including ones that work over ssh for editing files on servers), and none of those are vi. I can manage vi if I must, but its an effort and distracts from the task because I have to think about how to do things in vi.
My favourite editor is mcedit, which you get by installing mc (midnight commander)
Like nano but (IMO) easier to use with a lot more features
I'd argue that OpenBSD would be worthy of that title, too. It is incredibly easy, elegant, and simple. The thoughtfulness that goes into all the base system utilities in OpenBSD is so appreciated.
FreeBSD is kinda somewhere in between Open/NetBSD and Linux in my opinion. Their docs are OK, but the handbook leaves a lot to be desired, and they don't seem to have nearly nice little quality of life utilities that OpenBSD has out of the box.
Very beginner friendly lol. These people have no idea.
Micro is a beginner-friendly console text editor. This isn't.
I do think Micro is a nice editor, but we need a tiny, BSD licensed pico/nano for true beginners
Atto has a great man page that would give a user everything they needed to know if they were unfamiliar with emacs keybindings.
By this I mean, a beginner to NetBSD is already a far more competent user than a beginner in many other contexts of OS users.
How someone jumped to beginner-friendly from that is the real question.
tl;dr: I think somebody incorrectly described Atto as comparable to nano/pico, and these comments are dragging it because it's not the thing that it was never meant to be.
https://netbsd.org/about/redistribution.html
As for being compatible. Yes, FSF considers anything permissive to be compatible with their family of licenses. However, it is a one-way relationship in that permissive code can be freely used by GPL projects, but not the other way around as using GPL code would impose further restrictions compared to a permissive license.
Yes, and free software wants to ensure it remains open. BSD's don't.
I have read the majority of Stallman's writings, I have met and talked to the man himself, and I even secured a signed poster for myself and the local computer club. But, I find both the argument that sharing the code without viral restrictions and with viral restrictions plausible as ways forward to greater software freedom. Heck, I would argue that history shows that the diversity of tactics has proven successful and that we are better off today than ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. So, maybe refrain from boilerplate retorts as we have bigger fish to fry and shut up and hack?
The parts of Linux that get integrated into BSDs should not be GPL-licensed, e.g. <https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/c339f4010dea8b0d754f8...> and its siblings use MIT.
Linux:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 321832 Dec 15 2021 /usr/bin/nano
People seem to be missing the point. Also NetBSD has what I call a "real single user mode". Last time I had to boot single user, ed(1) was the only editor available without some work. My guess is this new editor will be useful for people who do not want to deal with ed(1).
I have not seen it yet, but I guess it will be included in 11.1.
Edit: apparently it requires /usr to be mounted though
You are welcome!
I would prefer ms-edit or nano if I have to edit text files from the terminal.
Honestly after VSCode ate a good chunk of vim and emacs users I am not sure why something with similar UX but in terminal is not the standard yet in every *nix. Talk about sunken cost fallacy.
It did make for quite a surprise for existing users when the msedit logo popped up in their KDE Plasma launchers though.
Despite all those flaws, people keep writing new software in C every day, go figure.
Or ARM? It's from the 1980s! So old!
WordStar was for CP/M and MS-DOS, which was very much doing its own thing. Atto is for Unix.
For many, it is indeed about what they call "muscle memory". Almost impossible to change after so many years. And therefore I hope everyone would provide keybinding alternatives generally (shouldn't be that hard).
That's… not what "standard" means.
Not "40 years ago". Non-stop all day every day for 55 years.
The fact that you personally don't use it today is as irrelevant as if you were ranting about "why doesn't Linux have a Start menu!? It's 2026!!!"
I think somebody incorrectly described Atto as comparable to nano/pico, and these comments are dragging it because it's not something that it was never intended as.
Most people don't want to learn (in particular not learn sufficiently hard to really improve).
Or you could just, yannow, give up on the intellectual rat race. It's pretty exhausting, and winning at it isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Learning requires some amount of humbleness, to accept you don't know everything.
Reminds me of that House MD episode where the delivery driver was a secret genius who was abusing DXM to dumb himself down just to feel happy.
"For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief."
I only stopped using pico/nano after writing my own editor, which blatantly stole pico's interface design.
> To ease the transition for new users...
So I would consider it for beginners ("new users") and friendly ("to ease").
> To ease the transition for new users, #NetBSD -current now includes an alternative editor to vi(1) and xedit(1) in its base system, atto(1). https://man.netbsd.org/atto.1
> It is a modeless screen-based editor similar to nano, pico, xedit, or emacs. It is only 48 kilobytes, making it suitable for inclusion in the rescue system.
I think it's fair to call it beginner-friendly, in context of BSD and vi, but maybe indeed it shouldn't be a part of the title.
Every time I get launched into nano/pico on a new system I find it very confusing. To use the help menu you need to know that ^-X means Ctrl-X and M-X means Alt-X. Why "Write Out" and not "Save"? And when I "Write Out" I'm offered DOS format or Mac format, and options to Append or Prepend (not even sure what that does).
It's completely bizarre if you're used to something like Notepad or Word.
When you launch nano without a file loaded, there's a notice at the bottom of the screen: [ Welcome to nano. For basic help, type Ctrl+G. ]
Press 'Ctrl + G' and it takes you to a help page that says, among other things, "Shortcuts are written as follows: Control-key sequences are notated with a '^' and can be entered either by using the Ctrl key or pressing the Esc key twice. Meta-key sequences are notated with 'M-' and can be entered using either the Alt, Cmd, or Esc key, depending on your keyboard setup."
You can't force a user to read docs or learn how the programs they're using work, but this is a reasonable attempt.
Does it also show that when invoked with a filename? If not: it should! (newbie user invoking with a filename *also* doesn't know how to use the editor. So that help pointer should be shown in both cases).
At least "Uncut" has been renamed to "Paste".
Nano was a (bloated as usual) GNU clone of Pico. Its only reason for existing is GPL freedumb nonsense that was popular back in the day. It copied the UX of Pico.
Pico was not developed as a standalone editor; rather it was the builtin editor for the Pine email reader. Hence the weird keybindings — it followed the UX of the email client.
Pico stood for PIne COmposer.
It became a simple universal editor because vi and emacs sucked and for some reason no one felt it necessary to invent something better.
Users repurposed the editor from a mail client because it was already there. Nearly every university Sun box in the 90s had Pine installed for reading email.
It was written by the same guy that invented IMAP at the University of Washington.
Can't wait for the Rust clone of Nano then the cycle will be complete.
People that do that are weirdos, and yes, I'm one. But I don't expect regular people to learn that way.
> Its only reason for existing is GPL freedumb nonsense that was popular back in the day.
These days we need more GPL, not less. We need AGPL and apparently, soon, AntiLLM-GPL.
The reason Pico became popular — if you went to university in the 90s — is normal people, not just turbonerds, needed the occasional ability to edit simple text files on Unix hosts.
They were already using Pine to read their email, so why not use the editor that used the same keybindings they already knew for sending mail?
> Command-line option --modernbindings (-/) makes ^Q quit, ^X cut, ^C copy, ^V paste, ^Z undo, ^Y redo, ^O open a file, ^W write a file, ^R replace, ^G find again, ^D find again backwards, ^A set the mark, ^T jump to a line, ^P show the position, and ^E execute.
> Above modern bindings are activated also when the name of nano's executable (or a symlink to it) starts with the letter "e".
So if you symlink nano to /usr/bin/editor and make it the default $EDITOR, then you now do get CUA-like bindings by default.
There’s still a lot of more things they perhaps should enable by default. I don’t know whether you’ve looked into .nanorc, but you can turn on stuff like syntax highlighting and line numbers, it’s just all off by default.
I don’t actually use nano myself, but I was really taken aback by how featureful it is when you look closely. Not st the level of Vim or Emacs, but more than expected. I basically stumbled upon someone on Reddit /r/unixporn that "riced" their nanorc and it piqued my curiosity.
For most people though, I think micro is a better fit than nano if you want a terminal CUA-style editor.
Maybe stupid question but do you then need to run nano through the symlink to get the new bindings or is the existence of a symlink enough? Wouldn’t nano have to check every directory for a symlink to itself to do that? There’s no way to get all symlinks for a specific file without checking the whole file system, right?
Sure, GUI software is much more intuitive. But if you start with the constraint of being a TUI editor with no mouse support, nano does extremely well
I’m thinking that because the text you referenced also says:
“for users who are not accustomed to text editors with separate insertion and editing modes, and includes support for editing UTF-8 text.”
I’m not sure the group “used to editors without visible menus, but doesn’t know vi” is very large, though.
I think the main take-away is that vi/vim is too complicated for many folks. I use nano a lot on the commandline. For quick editing it is so much more convenient than vim.
"for users who are not accustomed to text editors with separate insertion and editing modes"[0] could be construed as "beginner-friendly" (albeit with some squinting, I'd concede.)
"Hey, how do I insert one file into another in text editor?"
"Which text editor?"
"Text editor."
"Sounds like a personal problem."
You might object that, when it was first released, before Windows, it was not the first text editor on the operating system, which was MS-DOS, and so "Notepad" might have already been too generic even then. Microsoft would have agreed with you, because that version was called "Multi-Tool Notepad".
(And VSCode also took some really good command line name real estate)
I think it looks great. Syntax highlighting, multi-buffer, splits, standard emacs commands... For new users in the emacs camp, this seems like a nice editor to include in the base install. Even as a vi user, I'd be pretty happy being stuck with this in a rescue system.
Just noting for completeness, as I didn’t catch any mention of it.
However, the code is a mess, with deliberately cryptic identifiers (e.g., `w_doto` for `cursorOffset`), redundant functions (e.g., `vtputc()` is a strict subset of the behavior of `vtpute()`) and a bunch of other weird choices (e.g., deeply-baked assumptions that one byte == one char == one column, even thought Big5 and ShiftJIS were already a thing when it was written).
I tried adding UTF-8 support to mg a couple years ago and basically gave up.
I'll probably be an atto convert.
Well, sometimes we call the cursor "the dot."
I think this alias was an aid to porting Lisp from some other Emacs variant in the 80s that used "dot" instead of "point". Never figured out which. It isn't mg because mg doesn't run Lisp.
https://docs.moodle.org/400/en/Atto_editor https://github.com/moodlehq/moodle-editor_atto
I feel like most people who even know about NetBSD would be technical enough to at least function at a basic level in something like vi or nano.
A lot of people in my circles recently got fed up with Windows breaking everything. They went from teasing about Linux, to installing it.
... And then the kernel fully embraced genAI.
The same people went, "No thanks." Saw NetBSD's AI stance, and started installing it.
Granted, tech people. But not that deep into things. Most are scared of the command line - but find they don't need it.
> atto is not the standard editor.
Hah. That is clearly a reference to https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html
Note, I'm not talking about Lisp per se, just some kind of mechanic within the editor to allow the user to make extensions to it.
unless someone can offer a custom keybinding mechanism.. and custom dynamic functions the user can bind to..
> atto is not the standard editor
(If don't want to link curses and terminfo)
For me ait is a 277.3K static binary (musl)
Here's an earlier "Anthony's Editor" by Anthony Howe of MK Systems for IOCC 1991
https://www.ioccc.org/1991/ant/index.html
Here is a message about writing editors he sent to comp.editors in 1991
https://web.archive.org/web/20031214211718if_/http://ned.rub...
https://web.archive.org/web/20040221091356if_/http://ned.rub...
The later Anthony's Editor upon which atto is based, from 1993:
https://web.archive.org/web/20101130024855if_/http://sites.g...
The atto author got it to compile on GNU/Linux:
https://github.com/hughbarney/Anthonys-Editor--for-Ubuntu-Li...
According to the above Usenet communication, Howe was not a CS major
Perhaps this explains why his IOCC entries are so good IMHO
His 6086-character grep-like utility, "ag", from 1993 is all-time favorite
It still compiles today: 30.6K static binary (musl)
Atto seems to be a little smaller than that version of ae, though.