GNU Nano gains optional modern keybindings – OSnews

Linux@lemmy.ml – 84 points – 5 months ago

I almost feel like this a somewhat pointless feature. It's almost easier to just learn the default ones as opposed to adding "-modernbindings" or creating an "enano" variant/copy.

That's your opinion.

I like updating it to modern conventions. One day they become default and on another day you get rid of the old ones. The people of the future don't have to learn two sets of keybindings.

It's definitely just my opinion. Honestly did not mean to imply otherwise.

I would almost prefer them to just switch to the new keybindings by default in version 8.0.

It's definitely just my opinion. Honestly did not mean to imply otherwise.

For my opinion I usually create a comment below my post to seperate my opinion and the post itself.

On-topic: I do believe it's useful to have this switch and there's nothing stopping distros to change their default. Completely replacing the default keybindings might be surprising to long time users, but I also believe it should be done at some point. For the meantime this switch can be simply added as an alias.

Fair point. I guess this was more of a casual post, so I didn't think too much about it.

I would have preferred if they switched to new keyboard model in version 8.x by default.

I am a relatively light Linux user. Raspberry Pi headless via DietPi/Debian for NAS/Media server/torrents/PiHole and some experiments with self hosted services on major cloud services. I prefer to stick to defaults whenever possible.

I prefer to stick to defaults whenever possible.

Same goes for me.
E.g. changing vim keybindings on my local system to better suit my non-QWERTY keyboard would be annoying since they don't transfer to remote systems. That's a reason I like fish, because it's defaults are modern and useable, compared to zsh/bash which benefits strongly from plugins.

While I am usually resistant to change, I remain ever vigilant to try not be that XKCD guy

After all that, no ^S to save 🥲

^S for unprompted save is in the default keybinds, not that I could say when it was added. (Pretty sure it wasn't a pico thing, but that leaves quite a bit of time unaccounted for.)

Muscle memory for other editors kicked in when I was editing something and did a literal slow realisation and double-take when it worked.

Now if only I could stop pressing ^W in Firefox to use nano's "whereis" to find something that'd be great.

For those unaware, it closes the current tab. Or the whole browser. Ugh.

:GASP: ^S does save! I have played myself for a fool all these years!!

Now I just have to unlearn ^X, Y, enter. . . :thisisfine:

Firefox desperately needs a way to customize keyboard shortcuts, especially to disable them. Shortkeys isn't really enough.

FYI: ctrl + shift + t brings back closed tabs.

True. Other tools include: Ctrl+Shift+N to bring back a closed window if there's another window of the same browser instance still open, and when there isn't, there's Restore Previous Session which is accessible a couple of ways.

Neither bring back the comment that was being typed in a textbox on the page though. Guess when I usually ^W

True, I remember the first time I used nano, I was like "Ctrl + O to save, huh?"

^S works!! ...As revealed by our kind palindromic friend on the other sibling comment! Why they don't just list it on the statusbar we would never know!

Probably because Ctrl+S is the shortcut for scroll lock on the terminal so it can be a bit problematic if you start using it when not in nano. It freezes the output and you have to use Ctrl+Q to unlock.

Makes sense! I should go check what my Zellijn configs are set to on the servers 🤔

"modern" is a very loaded term here

creating an “enano” variant/copy

What's wrong with that?

Providing optional alternative keybindings for people who know a set of bindings from other tools makes lot of sense. I always appreciate that some tools provide these. This shows that the devs think about newcomers who are used to other set of bindings. It's optional.

BTW the blog post you posted has only 4 sentences (excluding the quote). I often dislike articles that short, but on the other hand, at least its not blown up with crap. So there is that.

My issue is that the only time I use vim or nano it's because I'm logged into some server where you're going to be stuck with the defaults anyway. I guess it's nice on your home machine, but customising a bunch of servers with your personal preferences isn't really something you can do in most work situations.

Yes, that's why I still need to learn how vi and vim in their default config work (in fact I started like that, so I know already). I wanted to get into finding as solution to this problem. Years ago I read in Reddit someone setup a keyboard macro (outside of Vim) to execute bunch of commands to setup the environment in the live session, while in Vim. At least some of the configuration can be used like that.

Otherwise, yeah this really sucks. That is not a unique problem to editors, but any software that you run with a customized local setup and with bare naked server version. If you often switch back and forth, it makes sense to just use one set of keybindings. That also is the point: For people using other tools, it makes sense to provide these alternative keybindings, so they don't need to relearn the nano specific setup.

Edit: Too many Buts reduced.

I’m pretty sure enano means dwarf in Spanish. Not that it’s an issue.

What does "modern" mean? Emacs-like? Vim-like? Some other bastard system?

Read the Article. Modern like what most Graphical Editors Ship.

So "some other bastard system" it is, then.

That's a shame; a GNU project should be consistently GNU-like (i.e. adopt Emacs key bindings).

I like all editors to have as many diverse sets of keybindings as possible. Sadly most apps don't, which is a main reason why I never bothered to properly learn emacs bindings, as I wouldn't be able to use them anywhere else.

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Wait, people are still using nano?

People who only use the terminal to edit a few config files are usually fine with nano. Even more so with these new keybindings.

For more involved edits an editor like VSCode is usually more useful anyway.

For me vim works well, but I've already taken the time to learn its basic usage.