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GNU Nano Gets New Stable Release
jones_supa writes: GNU Nano 2.4.0 has been released as the first stable update to this UNIX command line text editor in a number of years. The release codenamed "Lizf" brings a wide variety of changes: full undo system, Vim-compatible file locking, linter support, formatter support, flexible syntax highlighting, and random bugfixes.
Nano is a full screen text editor.
Ed is a command line editor.
Have Slashdot editors never used a teletype?
For me, nano fulfills a vital role:
When some inexperienced Linux user has to edit some file in some form of Linux and there is no gui available, I point them to nano, because it behaves pretty closely to what they expect from a text editor (which tends to be something like notepad...sigh).
The other, most common alternatives aren't nice for newcomers. vi comes preinstalled in most *nixes, but it is just alien to your average user, and emacs - though it behaves more like what users expect - always ends confusing them because of the key chords (and it doesn't come installed in most distros, if I am not mistaken).
nano is simple enough and good enough to get the job done, and most Linuxes have it pre-installed.
So, thank you nano developers. Keep up the good work!
The tiny editors do have their uses. They tend _not_ to require dozens of unrelated and bulky graphical packages to support them, the failure of any of which can disable the graphical editor. And they work well over poor bandwidth connections to remote servers, and even work well on overburdened, very lightweight virtualization servers for software routers or proxies.
So making them work really well can save work time and be very appreciated by people doing critical work with very real constraints.
Even modern, GUI based systems have tools that work outside the GUI, or in a text-mode terminal of some kind.
Maintaining such tools is just as needed as maintaining other parts of a system. Or creating new bits, for that matter. If not done, it would only be a matter of time before you'd have (badly) broken bits of software all over the place. To the point where a system becomes unusable to do real work. Text mode editors are just one of many components of modern systems (and imho, not in the "buggy whip" department anyway).
Besides: many people use it. Among other reasons, probably because it saves them time, or does some jobs better than other editors. As long as there are enough users, that alone makes developer's time well spent.