 Hello everybody, I am Matthew Miller. I am the Fedora project leader, and I'm here to talk about nano Which is a text editor now. This is a change something that's new in Fedora 33 That I am not behind. I didn't I didn't anything to do with this, but I support it and I'm excited to talk about it So first I want to talk about What a text editor is and what this change is exactly obviously I think we all know what a text editor is a piece of software that you know edits text files Unlike a word processor. It doesn't have fancy features for formatting and things like that It and basically just ASCII Unicode text files and that that's all it is often used as a programmers editor although there are more complicated IDEs that are Specialized for programming a lot of text editors have programming features as well and The important thing to note here is we didn't you know get rid of any text editors in Fedora There's a still a whole bunch of them, you know VI Vim and Emacs and a Joe, which is the one I actually used the most myself a bunch of text editors are there But we changed the default so that if you are in a terminal and something happens That makes an editor pop up one of the most common things people come across is running get commit And then it asks you for a commit message by popping it by editor But there are other cases when you want to like edit a file with sudo dash e where the default editor is used and so historically that default editor has been Vim or vi and The change here is just to make it so that the default is now nano so And this also doesn't affect like a graphical text editor like g edit something you might run, you know in your GUI session. It's just when you get an editor at the terminal and Yeah, so so what why what's up with Nana? How did we get to nano go back in the beginning of time in Unix? The actual default text editor was a thing called Ed Ed still exists in Fedora And it is a line based editor So when you run Ed it doesn't actually even show you the file you're editing you have to print you have to run a command to print the file to show it and When you edit everything is basically kind of based on what line you're on and then you edit you You enter commands to change the text on that line This seems crazy But if you consider that a lot of people weren't actually interacting with the computer via Like a keyboard and monitor, but they actually had a teletype machine, which is basically a printer hooked up to a computer and Makes a lot more sense everything Ed suddenly becomes becomes rational It's it makes sense for the this whole interface of I'm typing on a keyboard and the computer's gonna print stuff back out You may have seen this kind of thing in movies all the time movies like to show this as a computer interaction because it actually Fits the narrative of a movie more than a computer screen does So hack hacker movies like to have teletype like displays And actually this is an aside, but I think it's cool I helped a blind and deaf woman get set up with Fedora a while ago And she really liked this because she actually used a single line Braille terminal It's basically a device that was you know 20 characters of Braille that could could show a line at a time and Mechanical Braille and the ed interface was perfect for that in a way that you know basically any windows or Mac editor Just wasn't wasn't designed for so that was cool. Anyways text editors vi So this was this line-based editor then sometime I don't know the decade probably the 70s Bill Joy who went on to fun to be a co-founder of Sun Microsystems wrote this thing called vi It stands for visual editor and it actually has a whole full-screen display of your file and shows the file you're working on but the commands and the way it works are really still deeply tied to this idea of working line by line and In fact, it has a mode based editor So there's an edit mode and a display mode that are completely separate and you switch back and forth It is a very powerful interface and many people have come to love it Especially in the form of them which is vi enhanced or vi improved that makes sense. Yes Which has a lot more features including a lot of programming features That are like syntax highlighting and all sorts of fanciness So people like vi and I want to stress vi is not going away. Vim is not going away, but One of its issues is when you start it when it starts to edit a file It is not obvious what to do it. It's not obvious how to edit files on It's not obvious how to enter text. It's not edit none of the commands are Easily apparent to a modern computer user and it doesn't really tell you what to do In fact, it gives you a help message about what to do that doesn't really help unless you already know how to use the mode base interface so stack exchange the site for help with computer questions and things Has a question about how to exit vi that has over two million views Like it's one of their most popular questions help. I'm stuck in vi How do I get out and we actually saw that a lot in fedora support things for new users you get stuck in vi What do you do? So that brings us to the change process and I actually did a poll here and it seems like a lot of people Here are not completely familiar with our change process, which is awesome because now I now I get to talk about it basically The change process is in fedora We have you know a lot of packages working on different things and in general if you just want to make a change to your thing You go ahead and do it. You may be announce and develop list I've done this or you you just put it in the release notes those kind of things But if you have a bigger change, it's going to affect a lot of people We have a process called the change process and there's a template for that you fill out And once you've got that filled out, you give it to our program manager who's ben cotton at this time And ben will work with you to get that all flushed out and then that's submitted to develop list for discussion So that's what happened here Some people chris murphy and specific working in the fedora workstation working group We're looking at the problems that actual users are facing with you know running running fedora And why what new users what hurdles new users hit and this came up as something that could be easily improved to make the experience better for new users And so this was proposed And I find this very funny because it's a very small change really like nothing's being taken away nothing nothing is Nothing even if if you don't like uh, if you don't like nano all you need to do is set your Editor variable in your in on your in your dot files to you know, whatever you like I set mine to joe and then you'll get your editor or preference still It's just changing what what comes up when you haven't configured anything And when you just when you get a default editor some sort So this proposal went to develop list and had hundreds of very passionate messages Many more than a lot of our bigger changes like the compressed swap or butter fs Or even system d resolve d all of these things got got changed Got got discussed to pretty pretty hot discussion on all of those but by far people care most about changing the text editor It certainly brings out people's passions But after a long discussion fesco, which is the fedora engineering steering committee Decided to vote yes to this and so it is it is now the default in fedora 33 And here we are. So I think we've done a good thing and made Made it a little bit easier to use when you run nano instead of bringing up into a complicated interface. It's a very simple thing with easy controls like control x and the simple controls are listed at the bottom of the screen When you go to x that it prompts you if you want to save your file or not some basic kind of user friendly features Um The nano text editor actually comes I know a lot about the history of text editors I could I could write a very boring book. I'm gonna I'm gonna tell you anyways There used to be a very popular they still is a very popular text based email client called pine And pine had an editor called pico, which was basically designed for you know, composing emails and That was very popular, but um under under a license that wasn't quite open source So now you know, it's a small measurement. That's the joke And to make a small basic text editor that's easy to use and so that's where that comes from Anybody have any questions about all of this? What text editor would I use to write my very boring book about text editors? I would probably use joe joe is joe's own editor. It's an acronym and it is a Text editor that very roughly uses word star style key bindings word star was a word processor that was popular in the late 80s early 90s and Was also the key bindings that were used by the borland Compiler c compiler and pascal compiler And I learned c programming using the borland compiler and their ide So it was easy for me to pick up joe when I switched to Unix and social Linux and didn't want to learn vi I have a long career as a sys admin. So I did learn vi. I don't hate it It's just not my go-to for writing great for adding config files But um for me a text editor with modes is kind of a barrier to easy writing. So I prefer joe for that Ben cotton says there's a thing called word grinder, which is very good for not being distracted and has a Smart and handsome maintainer Ben is word grinder a gooey text editor or a terminal based one Both it can be both. Wow Yeah And we do have a lot one of the things that came up in discussion is why not g edit, which is a You know gnome based text editor Also pretty basic and simple, but it's actually a gooey program rather than a console program The problem with that is running it out of a terminal Like if you're doing a commit it kind of popping up a whole new window can be kind of a jarring experience So we wanted something that would still be a terminal based text editor There are some comments about emacs being a whole operating system of its own there This is true when I worked at boston university a couple of my old school unix admin co-workers and programmers software engineers there Would literally start up emacs like that their computer would boot to emacs And then they would run everything from there. That was their operating shell. They're basically their windowing environment was an emacs session they're People who like it really like it. It's it's like the people who like tiling window managers It's their own own special universe People are throwing out text editors in in the chat here any other questions How do I exit word grinder ben? all right I think that's uh a good 15 minute overview of this change. I hope this was interesting to people Um, I do not use joe inside of joe's window manager. I didn't even know there was such a thing jwm Or is that just a coincidence with the jays? I'm not sure Hey matthew Yes, marie. We've had the same question in here twice. Oh, I think it's a good one Um for someone who's just starting out. What's easier to learn than on nano oh, so The great thing about nano is you barely have to learn it It's just some basic commands and you can tech write and whatever. Um, there's not there's not a learning curve at all vim is Is something that has a hard learning curve like it takes it takes some deliberate getting used to to do it I think if you're interested in it It is it can be very productive a very productive environment if you want to spend the time learning to use it And you can use it as a programming editor and so on I think these days probably people use editors like vs code Eclipse some of the gooey editors a lot more for programming. Um, although vi still is quite popular among programmers Um, I think in some ways it it kind of depends on your use one of the nice things as a sysadmin Vi is guaranteed to be there on pretty much any unix or unix like Linux like system You're going to have vi available to you. So knowing the basics is Is a is a good skill especially if you want to sysadmin career If you're using it as a programmer You could see if see if it clicks for you if it clicks for you cool if it doesn't it's probably really not worth your time Just for its own sake, but if you like it cool If you are not a programmer or sysadmin Um, I think the only reason to really learn it would be to show off which there's nothing wrong with that But um, there there are uh, you know There's other other places you can invest your time that probably have a bigger payoff for you cool Some comments in the text that there's also a thing called neo vim, which is better than vim It's like vim improved improved I guess Oh, and someone says Nessia suggests that an adventure vim adventures.com a game to learn So that sounds fun. Thanks Matthew for talking about mana. Yeah awesome