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by alphadevx 2062 days ago
As a long time nano user, this makes me happy!

"To make the default Fedora experience better, we’ve set nano as the default editor. nano is a friendly editor for new users. Those of you who want the power of editors like vi can, of course, set your own default."

I can only imagine the mailing list discussion around that one :-)

Looking forward to upgrading as Fedora remains my daily driver, so thank you at all involved.

3 comments

Even as a vim/neovim user for the best part of twenty years I think nano being the default is a good idea. Attracting new users to the shiny world of desktop linux, only to put them off by getting 'trapped' in vim is a pointless exercise.
> I can only imagine the mailing list discussion around that one :-)

Here it is [1].

This was actually discussed on HN a few months ago as well [2]. I've used Linux for 20 years and still use nano for all quick config file edits. It's part of my setup so I didn't even realize that it wasn't set at all by default.

[1]: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fe...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23818199

As someone who used nano in the late 90s, it makes me nervous. I recall that you had to be careful to always use "nano -w" otherwise it would silently corrupt long lines, breaking configuration files which use one entry per line (like crontabs). Since then, I have always removed nano from every system I touch, to prevent accidents.
-w/--nowrap is now the default and I think it has been for a long time.
Nano is the first thing I install on a system. It is the closest thing you can get to Pico from the Pine email client from back then, and it's great because it's simple and gets the job done. No muss, no fuss.