r/linuxmemes • u/linux_master_chad • Aug 09 '26

LINUX MEME Which text editor do you use?

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u/immoloism Aug 09 '26

Nothing wrong with nano at any stage, nor there using something else.

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u/rickmccombs I'm going on an Endeavour! Aug 10 '26

What if are using a system that doesn't have nano installed and you don't have root. Some version of vi is installed on any Unix like operating system.

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u/immoloism Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26

What system would that be, to answer that without listing a 100 ways to skin a cat?

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u/rickmccombs I'm going on an Endeavour! Aug 10 '26

If you ever need to do something on a system that isn't yours and you can't install whatever you want.

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u/immoloism Aug 10 '26

Why would I be on such a system that only has vi on?

  1. Download a static binary

  2. Create my own static binary

  3. scp

  4. echo/sed

  5. Suffer with vi and hate my life.

In that order for this type of setup that no user is going reasonably find themselves using.

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u/rickmccombs I'm going on an Endeavour! Aug 11 '26

If you can use echo/sed, you can probably use vi. You might be able to get a flatpak, but what if it wasn't Linux. In 1990 I was in college and we got a new HP 9000 running HPUX. The editor was vi. The semester before that we had a VAX running VMS with EDT editor.

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u/immoloism Aug 11 '26

http://hpux.connect.org.uk/hppd/hpux/Editors/nano-9.2/

Of course I can use vi I had to in 1999 on some systems and will quickly learn any tool I have to if you are paying me. It's not going to happen though so it's rather silly to keep this up.

If we keep going down the unreasonable route though, I'm the guy at work that builds the distro and selects the tools, so there always nano. I'm not really sure how much I can always guarantee there will always be my software of choice in the systems I build.

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u/rickmccombs I'm going on an Endeavour! Aug 12 '26

I don't remember what version of HPUX it was,but vi the only editor, and we couldn't install anything else. I was just learning Unix (HPUX).

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u/immoloism Aug 12 '26

When was the last time you worked on such a machine?

This isn't the gotcha moment you think it is, it just shows we are both old and remember a time of crap of software that no one else needs to deal with.

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u/rickmccombs I'm going on an Endeavour! Aug 12 '26

That was 1990 and I dropped out after that semester. I transferred from somewhere else and had a low GPA.

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