To promote this to a top-level comment, because I think it's important context: nothing in the README file says the point is to be "beginner-friendly". As far as I can tell, that's something that Hacker News or whoever submitted this used as a description. Neither the word "beginner" nor the word "friendly" appear in the README; its goal is to "be the smallest functional Emacs in less than 2000 lines of C."
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.
luke8086 1 days ago [-]
OP here, I just paraphrased the announcement:
> 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.
SoftTalker 24 hours ago [-]
I can't imagine a beginner really knowing what is going on in nano.
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.
basscomm 22 hours ago [-]
> I can't imagine a beginner really knowing what is going on in nano.
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.
lakeviewterrace 19 hours ago [-]
That's because no one knows their history anymore.
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.
oblio 17 hours ago [-]
Nobody learns to use an editor - or for that matter, learns anything - by figuring out a history lecture first.
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.
lakeviewterrace 13 hours ago [-]
I should clarify.
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?
anthk 18 hours ago [-]
Joe editor dates back to 1991 and it came with jpico, jmacs and jstar as pico, emacs and wordstar clones as a hard link.
Tummler68 15 hours ago [-]
[dead]
setopt 19 hours ago [-]
Just FYI, they did try to improve that a bit. Release notes for nano v8.0:
> 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.
echoangle 16 hours ago [-]
> Above modern bindings are activated also when the name of nano's executable (or a symlink to it) starts with the letter "e".
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?
setopt 15 hours ago [-]
I believe you have to run it through the symlink, and that it just checks argv[0] to decide. It’s the same Vim does, FWIW: if you run it via a symlink called `vi` it enters a vi-compatible mode, and if you run it as `evim` it suddenly acts as a non-modal text editor, and as `vimdiff` it enters the diff mode.
wongarsu 6 hours ago [-]
As someone who was a beginner once, I found nano leaps and bounds more intuitive than vim. You can quite easily stumble your way through nano with minimal exerimentation, and once you figured out that ^ stands for control you can just use the handy always-visible command reference at the bottom
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
mmmlinux 22 hours ago [-]
I use nano the same way I use notepad. I open a file, edit it, hit close, and agree to save when it complains to me.
forgotpwd16 22 hours ago [-]
>Why "Write Out" and not "Save"?
At least "Uncut" has been renamed to "Paste".
jpablo 20 hours ago [-]
First time I opened vi I had to power cycle the computer to get out of it. If nano/pico is not user friendly, vi is user user antagonistic.
SoftTalker 14 hours ago [-]
Oh I absolutely agree, none of vi, emacs, nano/pico make any sense to a beginner. vi probably the worst because of the modes. But I my point was just that I don't think nano is particulary beginner-friendly. Maybe the least worst though.
dang 21 hours ago [-]
Ok, we've removed beginner-friendliness from the title above. It's still interesting!
drummojg 1 days ago [-]
I would never drag pico. I wrote software that's been packaged in Linux distros in pico. And I lost the urge to be The Smartest Guy In The [Room/Mailing List/Forum] a long, long time ago.
Natfan 1 days ago [-]
what's really the point in being the smartest person in the room? you'll never learn anything!
majorchord 22 hours ago [-]
Not only that, but you constantly feel like Idiocracy is playing out in real time, and that everyone else around you is closer to monkeys than a rational empathetic human... it's exhausting, lonely and debilitating. Then you realize there are people much smarter than you, and you wonder how they must feel.
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."
metchio 1 days ago [-]
sometimes humans do irrational things / have illogical behaviour just to glorify their own ego. it happens also to the very best sometimes
MonkeyClub 1 days ago [-]
Yep, whenever you find yourself being the smartest person in the room, you need to find yourself a smarter room.
vinceguidry 1 days ago [-]
Or just learn how to teach.
aleph_minus_one 23 hours ago [-]
> Or just learn how to teach.
Most people don't want to learn (in particular not learn sufficiently hard to really improve).
lioeters 22 hours ago [-]
True, many a junior dev I've had to work with was convinced they're the smartest person in the room, good at what they do but so full of themselves they're unable to adapt, acquire new knowledge or consider new paradigms.
Learning requires some amount of humbleness, to accept you don't know everything.
vinceguidry 22 hours ago [-]
Motivating students to want to learn isn't rocket science, just a rare skill to see.
aleph_minus_one 15 hours ago [-]
If it is not rocket science, how does it work?
marssaxman 19 hours ago [-]
I used pico or nano as my everyday unix coding editor for something like fifteen years, starting in the late '90s. It was just fine. I couldn't stand vi and didn't see the point of emacs; I type faster than I think, so I never found that text-editing was enough of a bottleneck to make sophisticated automation worth the effort.
I only stopped using pico/nano after writing my own editor, which blatantly stole pico's interface design.
zimpenfish 21 hours ago [-]
> nothing in the README file says the point is to be "beginner-friendly"
"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.)
So I would consider it for beginners ("new users") and friendly ("to ease").
shevy-java 22 hours ago [-]
Well nano pico atto ... the name makes it comparable. Why would you expect people to not draw that connection?
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.
1 days ago [-]
MonkeyClub 1 days ago [-]
OpenBSD also has an Emacs-y non-extensible editor, mg(1):
Just noting for completeness, as I didn’t catch any mention of it.
torstenvl 24 hours ago [-]
I've used mg and find it generally useful. It's my default editor pretty much everywhere.
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.
Koshkin 20 hours ago [-]
> `w_doto` for `cursorOffset`
Well, sometimes we call the cursor "the dot."
torstenvl 20 hours ago [-]
Literally never heard that prior to hacking on the mg codebase.
kragen 13 hours ago [-]
In GNU Emacs, try running M-: (dot) RET.
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.
pratyahava 15 hours ago [-]
also in sam and acme editors in plan9 os
skydhash 17 hours ago [-]
Emacs called it “point” which is not as far. The cursor is just the visible widget.
SoftTalker 24 hours ago [-]
Also available for most linux distros as a package.
Who knew a little emacs-like editor would be so controversial.
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.
zeilenende 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
itomato 1 days ago [-]
NetBSD has beginners?
helterskelter2 21 hours ago [-]
NetBSD is IMHO the most beginner friendly nix out there. It's small, lean, and well documented. You could know almost nothing about nix, read their handbook, and come the other side half competent. Linux (my daily driver) by comparison is a constantly moving target with no single source for coherent documentation and where anything goes. FreeBSD is better, but when I last used the handbook it had plenty of outdated chapters, and it seemed like everything had so many different ways of doing things. NetBSD had small elegant solutions, and recompiling your entire system from scratch was a pleasant experience that didn't have me trapped in dependency hell or even needing to consult documentation after I got started.
dogcow 19 hours ago [-]
> NetBSD is IMHO the most beginner friendly nix out there.
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.
officeplant 1 days ago [-]
Currently seeing an influx of interest from new people who want an OS with strong anti-ai stances.
Narishma 24 hours ago [-]
And those who still use 32-bit machines, as Linux is in the process of killing support for them.
antiframe 22 hours ago [-]
Oh no! What does that mean for using Wine to play games? From what I understand a lot of Windows games (especially older ones) require 32-bit Wine, which requires 32-bit libs (which I assume requires 32-bit Kernel support). It's the sole reason I run 64- and 32-bit multilib on my Arch box: playing Windows games.
bityard 19 hours ago [-]
Running 32-bit software isn't going away, just running a 32-bit kernel.
tancop 22 hours ago [-]
64 bit Linux can run 32 bit programs just like Windows. Modern Wine is using a WoW64 model where the 64 bit host code loads 32 bit DLLs when some app needs them.
graemep 1 days ago [-]
Beginners to NetBSD who are not vi users.
excannuk 1 days ago [-]
That's not an empty set? I'm an eMacs guy, and I use vi when on the shell
graemep 22 hours ago [-]
I think there are a lot of people who are not comfortable with vi. Its much the same reason that some Linux distros default to nano.
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.
hxorr 20 hours ago [-]
Same here...
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
excannuk 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
mehjustmeh 21 hours ago [-]
It's funny because I learned enough vi to be useful specifically because of NetBSD forcing you to change "rc_configured=NO" to "rc_configured=YES" in rc.conf.
alnsn 1 days ago [-]
You can ask Claude to cross-complie, prepare an image (aka install) and run an emulator. I tried exactly this yesterday and in about an hour I could attach to tmux and run tests on emulated riscv64 board.
daishi55 1 days ago [-]
Careful, they might ban you!
1 days ago [-]
OnlineTux 1 days ago [-]
Why not just add nano?
Matl 1 days ago [-]
Because the BSD's are reflexively anti GNU.
ninjin 1 days ago [-]
nano(1) is GPLv3 last time I checked and that imposes more restrictions than most (all?) of the rest of the code in NetBSD. It is not about being "reflexive", it is a violation of the very ethos of the project. Gnu rejecting non-free licenses from their own distributions is not "reflexive", it is simply not in line with what they want to achieve and one should respect that.
Matl 1 days ago [-]
Unless they modify it, the GPL really doesn't impact them. AFAIK FSF considers most BSD/MIT style licences to be compatible. It's the other way around where things gets stuck. Unless they need Linux GPU/WIFI/BT drivers to make things work, of course. Then it's fine.
brewmarche 1 days ago [-]
> Unless they need Linux GPU/WIFI/BT drivers to make things work, of course. Then it's fine.
Modification is the whole point of open source: "Unless you want to modify Windows, the closeness does not impact you". If you want to learn about how NetBSD looks at things, there is this page:
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.
Matl 4 hours ago [-]
> Modification is the whole point of open source
Yes, and free software wants to ensure it remains open. BSD's don't.
jmclnx 1 days ago [-]
Size:
Linux:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 321832 Dec 15 2021 /usr/bin/nano
per the link, atto(1) is 48 kilobytes.
whartung 22 hours ago [-]
I always thought the essential feature of an emacs was its extensibility. I never felt that emacs was just a collection of keybinds and split buffer windows.
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.
kragen 13 hours ago [-]
Right. Vim is an Emacs in this sense, but mg, atto, joe, readline, etc., aren't.
Rucadi 1 days ago [-]
For me the most easy-to-use editor for cli / ssh and relatively lightweight is https://github.com/sinelaw/fresh everybody can just use it intuitively.
hnlmorg 1 days ago [-]
I’ll take a look at this. But it’s worth noting that NetBSDs goal was to have something small enough that it can be used in a recovery shell.
Daunk 1 days ago [-]
I think they'd have your head on a plate if you suggested a vibe coded text editor.
stonogo 1 days ago [-]
There is nothing intuitive about any text editor.
LeFantome 12 hours ago [-]
Ironically, the best text editor for *nix may be Microsoft Edit.
mig39 24 hours ago [-]
Is this the same editor that is used in the open-source Moodle LMS?
Moodle's is a PHP-written web editor. Submitted is a C-written terminal editor.
cowlevel 1 days ago [-]
To be beginner friendly they should call it text editor. Or notepad, or quickwriter. No beginner is going to guess that something called Atto lets you write words on a computer.
vintermann 2 hours ago [-]
Good point. An undersold feature of the old MS DOS editor (which was pretty nice) was that its command was ...edit.
(And VSCode also took some really good command line name real estate)
kragen 13 hours ago [-]
It is important for beginner-friendliness that it be possible to ask for help.
"Hey, how do I insert one file into another in text editor?"
"Which text editor?"
"Text editor."
"Sounds like a personal problem."
hoppp 20 hours ago [-]
How do you exit atto?
Gotta make it hard:)
fodkodrasz 19 hours ago [-]
I guess it has poor (or nonexistent) unicode support in 48kb. My only gripe with NetBSD was its lacking UTF-8 support for many core tools (eg. wscons, vi) when I used it as daily driver beck in the days (NetBSD 5 RC2 times :P)
GalaxyNova 18 hours ago [-]
Nope! It has fully working UTF-8 support.
fodkodrasz 17 hours ago [-]
Wow! Nice!
JdeBP 15 hours ago [-]
… and multi-byte character set support was added for nvi2 about a decade and a half ago.
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)
kragen 13 hours ago [-]
Yeah, ae is awesome and inspirational, but it's missing some crucial features. It sounds like maybe he did eventually add a single level of undo, though?
Atto seems to be a little smaller than that version of ae, though.
ktnb 14 hours ago [-]
ait version 1.16 will be out soon.
jmclnx 1 days ago [-]
>making it suitable for inclusion in the rescue system
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.
iamnothere 1 days ago [-]
I think single user has nvi as well.
Edit: apparently it requires /usr to be mounted though
JdeBP 15 hours ago [-]
You are looking at the wrong one. Look at /rescue/vi .
bmacho 1 days ago [-]
Badly editorialized title.
arbor-group 1 days ago [-]
The beginner-friendly label seems to be obscuring what atto actually is, which is a very small Emacs-like editor meant to live in the base system. At roughly 48 KB and under 2,000 lines of C, it fits places nano and the larger alternatives do not, especially a rescue environment or single-user mode where you still need something more usable than ed or a stripped-down vi. That constraint also explains the choices people are arguing about here: Emacs bindings come with the design, and a permissively licensed C program can be maintained with the tools NetBSD already ships, unlike a Go editor such as micro. For someone new to NetBSD but already comfortable at a Unix terminal, that is a reasonable trade. It is less a first editor for a general beginner than a safety net that happens to be approachable once you are already in that world.
scottchiefbaker 17 hours ago [-]
[dead]
scottchiefbaker 18 hours ago [-]
[dead]
georgestones 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
IshKebab 1 days ago [-]
> Perhaps all that needs to be known to use atto at a basic level is that holding the control key, pressing x, then pressing w will write the currently open file, and holding the control key, pressing x, then pressing c will exit the editor.
Very beginner friendly lol. These people have no idea.
Micro is a beginner-friendly console text editor. This isn't.
chipotle_coyote 1 days ago [-]
Nothing in the README file says the point is to be "beginner-friendly"; as far as I can tell, that's something that Hacker News or whoever submitted this used as a description. Neither the word "beginner" nor the word "friendly" appear in the README; its goal is to "be the smallest fuctional Emacs in less than 2000 lines of C."
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.
IshKebab 19 hours ago [-]
The post says "To ease the transition for new users".
hnlmorg 1 days ago [-]
I don’t think NetBSD and yourself are using the term in the same context.
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.
passthejoe 1 days ago [-]
Micro is MIT licensed, so it should be shippable in NetBSD base.
But written in Go, and I would expect the NetBSD base only includes software buildable using tools already in the base system.
iamnothere 1 days ago [-]
11 MB is also a lot bigger than 48k
I do think Micro is a nice editor, but we need a tiny, BSD licensed pico/nano for true beginners
passthejoe 1 days ago [-]
I didn't realize the size difference was so huge.
Atto has a great man page that would give a user everything they needed to know if they were unfamiliar with emacs keybindings.
passthejoe 1 days ago [-]
Good point
CodeCompost 1 days ago [-]
It's using keystrokes inspired by emacs. Ok.
pwdisswordfishq 1 days ago [-]
As we all know, beginners love Emacs keystrokes.
vintermann 2 hours ago [-]
It's what they're used to, if they went to uni in the early 90s and were frozen into a block of ice since then.
yearolinuxdsktp 1 days ago [-]
Project headline is “The smallest functional Emacs in less than 2000 lines of C.”
How someone jumped to beginner-friendly from that is the real question.
IshKebab 19 hours ago [-]
Probably because the post starts "To ease the transition for new users..."?
1 days ago [-]
codedokode 1 days ago [-]
Why are they using weird key combinations instead of traditional Ctrl + S, Ctrl + A, Ctrl + C used in desktop applications? Why every console program wants to be a special snowflake and not use standard key combinations, please explain. I do not care that 40 years ago someone used Ctrl + C to send SIGINT, it is 2026 now.
elehack 1 days ago [-]
Atto's default key bindings match Emacs, which is about as standard as you get for non-modal editing keys in older Unix traditions.
pjmlp 1 days ago [-]
I would assert Wordstar style are equally as old.
Narishma 24 hours ago [-]
But are mostly forgotten while emacs keybindings are still popular and found in all kinds of places you wouldn't expect, like MacOS textboxes.
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).
12 hours ago [-]
cowlevel 1 days ago [-]
and isn't at all beginner friendly
codedokode 1 days ago [-]
Emacs is probably older than me why should we care about what they used in 80s?
jhgb 3 hours ago [-]
Calculus is older than you. Does that mean you won't use calculus?
MonkeyClub 1 days ago [-]
I see you’re using Latin characters...
knorker 22 hours ago [-]
It's 2026, why would anyone want to use an Intel architecture?
Or ARM? It's from the 1980s! So old!
pjmlp 1 days ago [-]
Depends, do you care about UNIX and C, as products from 1970's?
codedokode 24 hours ago [-]
UNIX doesn't exist anymore, and C has lot of negative points (easy to create buffer overflows, integer overflows, use-after-free, and other vulnerabilities).
pjmlp 23 hours ago [-]
It surely does, Linux distros, BSDs, Aix, z/UNIX are all alive and well.
Despite all those flaws, people keep writing new software in C every day, go figure.
anthk 13 hours ago [-]
Then use Redox OS, or convince Torvalds to merge Asterinas' memory handling code into Linux.
I think you're underestimating just how "standard" many of the shortcuts are when mapped against a standard shell.
codedokode 24 hours ago [-]
"Standard shell" also should allow Ctrl + C for copying, it makes no sense to use a different combination for console.
basscomm 22 hours ago [-]
Okay, but now you have to modify the shell and configure a different shortcut for SIGINT without stepping on something else.
codedokode 22 hours ago [-]
Is this problem a Nobel prize level problem?
knorker 22 hours ago [-]
55 years of a standard, but then you come and say that the standard should be something else.
That's… not what "standard" means.
athorax 24 hours ago [-]
These are about as standard as you can get when it comes to Unix keybindings
knorker 22 hours ago [-]
> I do not care that 40 years ago someone used Ctrl + C to send SIGINT, it is 2026 now.
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!!!"
insanetake 1 days ago [-]
These key combinations have been used for 50 years, so I'm not sure why you call them non-standard. They're just a different standard from what you're used to.
jhgb 22 hours ago [-]
How is Ctrl+S "more traditional" than C-x C-s? C-x C-s is like 50 years old by now. Surely that qualifies as "traditional".
boricj 1 days ago [-]
That sounds like Emacs. Wouldn't know though, given that I dislike vim too.
I would prefer ms-edit or nano if I have to edit text files from the terminal.
lostmsu 16 hours ago [-]
msedit ftw
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.
forevernoob 6 hours ago [-]
Bazzite recently started to ship msedit by default, which makes sense since a large portion of its userbase are first time Linux users.
It did make for quite a surprise for existing users when the msedit logo popped up in their KDE Plasma launchers though.
rustyhancock 1 days ago [-]
Because this isn't beginner friendly it's a new micro Emacs and those are standard libreadline/emacs bindings.
Rendered at 14:24:55 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
> 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.
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
At least "Uncut" has been renamed to "Paste".
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."
Most people don't want to learn (in particular not learn sufficiently hard to really improve).
Learning requires some amount of humbleness, to accept you don't know everything.
I only stopped using pico/nano after writing my own editor, which blatantly stole pico's interface design.
"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.)
[0] https://man.netbsd.org/atto.1
> To ease the transition for new users...
So I would consider it for beginners ("new users") and friendly ("to ease").
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.
https://man.openbsd.org/mg
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.
> atto is not the standard editor.
Hah. That is clearly a reference to https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html
You are welcome!
https://github.com/hughbarney/atto
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Linux:
per the link, atto(1) is 48 kilobytes.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.
https://docs.moodle.org/400/en/Atto_editor https://github.com/moodlehq/moodle-editor_atto
(And VSCode also took some really good command line name real estate)
"Hey, how do I insert one file into another in text editor?"
"Which text editor?"
"Text editor."
"Sounds like a personal problem."
* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/vi-family.html
unless someone can offer a custom keybinding mechanism.. and custom dynamic functions the user can bind to..
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
(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.
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
Very beginner friendly lol. These people have no idea.
Micro is a beginner-friendly console text editor. This isn't.
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.
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.
https://github.com/micro-editor/MICRO
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.
How someone jumped to beginner-friendly from that is the real question.
https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/history.html
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).
Or ARM? It's from the 1980s! So old!
Despite all those flaws, people keep writing new software in C every day, go figure.
[1] https://github.com/microsoft/edit
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 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.