crossposted from irc

      • jdeath@lemm.ee
        41·
        2 days ago

        wow, nano is usually everyone’s first editor and them moving on to Vim. interesting to invert that. what do you like about nano?

        • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
          2·
          1 day ago

          That depends a lot on when they started.

          When I first installed a distribution where the base system only came with nano instead of standard editors, I was very confused (and very disappointed that this whas what they’d come up with as a “friendly” interface).

          • jdeath@lemm.ee
            1·
            20 hours ago

            well, like the parent of my comment said, nano is a lot easier to use than vim or emacs. nano is much more like DOS edit or stuff like that. there are many memes about not being able to quit Vim, etc

        • Doomsider@lemmy.world
          72·
          2 days ago

          Ease of use. When it comes to coding I prefer a GUI as well.

          I used Vim when I first installed Linux. It was painful but I used it. I found Nano and I stopped using Vim. No comparison in usability.

          • jdeath@lemm.ee
            3·
            20 hours ago

            yeah Vim takes a lot of effort to learn. Like any advanced tool. I will 100% always fire up nano when in a hurry. but i like trying to learn Vim as an exercise (in torture? idk haha)

      • AnAustralianPhotographer@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        The main things i learnt from vim are Escape :q and ^Z. Not a dig on vim, but it was quite a learning curve at the time when nano has been good enough for just about everything i do day to day.

      • AnAustralianPhotographer@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        I dont know what that acronym means. I just use nano as a basic text editor, its automatically showing me different colours XML now. I have used it as a text editor for code before, but if i knew i was going to be coding lots, id look at others like vim and emacs. Me using it is a result of it being the quickest tool to get the job done at the time ‘efficiently’ and i know there are more powerful ones out there.

  • Phen@lemmy.eco.br
    28·
    2 days ago

    Back in the early 2000s I met some guy who had once sold a copy of edit.exe to some store as if it were some software he had written for managing orders and inventory. The folks at the store used windows, but they would open up edit.exe and it looked just like the stuff that the larger store chains used to manage their own orders… The guy just made a sample file and instructed them how to input data in a specific format that made it all look like a table, but it was just a text file with no validation of any kind.

      • balsoft@lemmy.ml
        7·
        2 days ago

        Nah. I was so annoyed by how primitive editors are that I started writing my own one, that would allow me to seamlessly traverse the AST of the code, rather than being stuck on the low abstraction levels of characters, words and paragraphs. After a bunch of misery making tree-sitter work with Haskell, and using it for a while, I stumbled upon Helix. It is pretty much my idea but faster and working well.

        • Victor@lemmy.world
          2·
          2 days ago

          Also the object-verb and selection-verb paradigm just makes so much more sense compared to vim’s verb-object/-motion paradigm. Especially with the ability to have multiple cursors and selections. It’s so powerful.

          I started with Emacs for about a year or two, then vim for about 10+ years, then neovim, then VS Code with vim bindings for a few years, then Kakoune, which was very interesting, then VS Code with Kakoune bindings, then the switch to Helix was very natural. Never looked back after about 2 years with Helix.

          It’s basically everything I loved from VS Code but in the terminal. And all the keyboard goodness from vim and Kakoune, combined. It’s great.

        • Alex@lemmy.ml
          2·
          2 days ago

          A lot of the Emacs language modes have been replaced with tree-sitter equivalents now.

          • balsoft@lemmy.ml
            2·
            2 days ago

            That’s not what I want though. I really enjoy jumping around the actual syntax tree of the code, e.g. “select the entire function body” or “select the next list element”, stuff like this. It becomes the natural way of traversing the code after a short while. Also, Emacs is still single-threaded and thus quite laggy and slow at times; however I do like it a lot and have used it for a number of years (with evil-mode), before finally jumping to my own editor and then helix.

    • caseyweederman@lemmy.ca
      2·
      2 days ago

      I keep finding new features. Tabs. Hsplit. Plugins. Authentication prompt at save time if it detects that the user you ran it under doesn’t have permission to write to that file.
      And of course keybinds that make a dang lick of sense.

  • Kojichan@lemmy.world
    61·
    2 days ago

    I remember using Notepad for a long time for coding in Windows. Then I was introduced to UltraEdit. It was cool, but expensive. Jumped onto NotePad++ and I’ve been enjoying it lots.

    I do also use IDEs, usually Codium based.

  • y0din@lemmy.world
    6·
    2 days ago

    edlin was my favorite for a long time 🙂

    Edlin is a line editor, and the only text editor provided with early versions of IBM PC DOS,[1] MS-DOS and OS/2.[2] Although superseded in MS-DOS 5.0 and later by the full-screen MS-DOS Editor, and by Notepad in Microsoft Windows, it continues to be included in the 32-bit versions of current Microsoft operating systems.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edlin

    edit: link and explanation of syntax used if anyone is interested. the w (write) and q (quit) commands made it somewhat similar to VI(M). https://www.computerhope.com/edlin.htm

      • y0din@lemmy.world
        1·
        8 hours ago

        Were you using Windows XP Home, by any chance?

        That tool was only included with Windows XP Professional, and even then, it was a command-line utility—so unless you were specifically looking for it or browsing through the %windir%\system32 directory, you probably wouldn’t have noticed it.

        The article I referenced didn’t specify exactly which 32-bit versions it came with or when it was removed—it just mentioned that it was still included in 32-bit Windows after the DOS era. I didn’t write the article myself, so I can’t really speak to its accuracy.

        Personally, I used that edline a lot back in the DOS days starting around 1985, until I switched to Notepad in Windows 95 and later to VIM when I moved to Linux after Windows 98. I never really checked for it in newer versions of Windows after that. A quick Google search confirmed it wasn’t included in XP Home, which would explain why you never saw it.

        Link to the forum I found this information about XP in: http://murc.ws/forum/hardware/general-hardware-software/49698-omg-edlin-still-lives-in-xp#post755768

        (edit: fixed a typo, added reference link)

    • zerofk@lemm.ee
      2·
      2 days ago

      Finally someone mentions edlin! Real programmers don’t need to see more than a single line at a time.

      • y0din@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 day ago

        that is absolutely true and also 640Kb RAM should be enough for everyone 😂

        all the hours and countless reboots spent optimizing config.sys and autoexec.bat to achieve 50kb more of available memory… good memories 🙂

        • dosuser123456@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
          2·
          1 day ago

          i just moved my files off to an external drive whenever my hdd got full haha

          i didnt really trust my coding skills enough to come close to config.sys…

  • Reptorian@programming.dev
    3·
    2 days ago

    I use KDE Kate for my coding. Scripting more accurately to some users, but I don’t find a meaningful distinction.