The thesis of this post is roughly that nano, when configured, is enough of an editor for the author. Which is totally fine! People should be happy with their tools and not feel pressured by popularity to use what others use (vim, emacs being prime competitors in this case).

Alas, nano (and pico before it) have a certain stigma among more "experienced" Unix users that more or less boils down to gatekeeping and snobbery. Which is a shame.

That said... it is worth considering that learning tools like editors is an investment in one's self and pushing through preference to genuinely try to use what others find value in can, if nothing else, help you better understand what you value and adjust your tooling to fit (much like the author adjusted Nano to be more like vim).

That's a pretty nuanced distinction though and I am glad that the author feels comfortable owning their preference and not feeling pressured by peers to conform to more "acceptable" choices while still having tried and learned from them.

The thing about that “snobbery and gate keeping” is that it’s not at all that.

Maybe not everyone’s experience mimics mine but I felt like people looked down at me a bit when I was 16 for using nano on the command line.

But, and here’s the kicker, if I hadnt been pushed into vim I would not be nearly as productive now.

There have been countless times in my career as a sysadmin/devops/SRE where I’ve been stuck with horrible latency to machines half a world away (or, a few miles away but the network is crappy) and being able to send just a few keystrokes and get a lot of power out of it is helpful.

That’s not counting all the “repeat” patterns or complex search and replace.

I remember still when I got my first job as a junior sysadmin, I spent a really long time logging in to each machine, updating a config file, logging out then going to the next one.

I didn’t need to be told that “ssh and nano is fine”, I needed to be told “there are better tools that you should invest in learning, because they will repay you back thousandfold”.

What I thought were people looking down on me were in fact people looking at me with hopeless pity, because I fought the idea of learning vim.

> Maybe not everyone’s experience mimics mine but I felt like people looked down at me a bit when I was 16 for using nano on the command line.

Just say "nano is Linus Torvald's editor of choice" (which is true and will instantly shut down the debate)

> I really need to switch over to something that is actually maintained and does utf-8 properly. Probably 'nano'.

https://www.tag1consulting.com/blog/interview-linus-torvalds...