I personally havent really used emacs for organizing, but I really like it for bash coding and writing software documenation in orgmode. I am even starting to get a little bit comfortable at writing my .emacs file but at some point I will have to do a lot of reorganizing and updating and I kind of dont want to do it (I still use .emacs and not emacs.d/init.el and all keybindings still use the legacy global-set-key command).
Apart from the work I am putting into it it is really great, because when I actually get to do stuff I can do so with great efficency. I am even starting to miss my emacs keybinds when not using emacs (especially ctrl-k for killing from your cursor position to the end of the line ctrl-a for jumping to the beginning of a line and ctrl-e for jumping to the end of a line). At this point when I am writing stuff in emacs (as example working on a bash script) I at maximum use my mouse for scrolling.
Fuck, I really did turn into the meme (and I am not even using it for longer than 4-5 months at maximum)___
I used to live in emacs, back when emacs stood-for "Eight Megs ( RAM ) & Continuous Swapping".
( the 386-486 days )
Morass-of-capability.
Then, after being fought-off by Vim a couple times, I read, in "The DESIGN of Everyday Things", that humankind has a mental-defect which causes us to NOT change-levels, when we NEED to have changed-levels.
People who speak louder, when the hearer doesn't even know the language, are doing this, e.g.
& after that, I encountered a good explanation of Vim's modality, & found out about vimtutor..
& tried it, again..
& then understood that by forcing my self to keep using Vim ( I'm autistic/woodenheaded, so forgetting what mode I'm in is much more frequent than it would be for neurotypicals ) applies-force to help break my unconscious-woodenness-of-mind, making my mind more levels-agile.
Through the years, it has worked.
I've not used Helix, which apparently is a modern improvement/replacement for Vim ( without much of the damn cruft ),
but modal editors do help make one's mind more levels-agile, & THAT is immensely worthwhile: it is competitive-advantage that few others invest-in!
No, I'm not recommending Vim: I'm recommending modal-editors.
Find the one which works rightest for you, & let it keep bashing your unconscious-mind's stuckness default-habit, & eventually you'll be cornered by fewer bugs, be broken to failure less often, etc.
Morass-of-capability felt nice, but it was solving the wrong problem.
Modal-editing corrects one's human mental-defect of not-changing-levels, to some extent, & that's like being ambushed by a gang, except that one's got what Crocodile Dundee called "a knife" on one..
ย ( :
_ /\ _
huh
ctrl x ctrl s go brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
me use nano too, emacs vim scary.
Vim and emacs are really worth it when you do a lot of writing and editing (whether it be code or text). If you only occasionally edit config files nano is completely fine. However I do recommend to learn stuff like exiting and saving in vim because no matter what, about every single distro has some form of vim so you might encounter it in imporant scenarios and then you know your way around.
I have, in the past, recommended, if you use Unix systems in a technical way, knowing at least how to do the following in vi (and I use emacs):
Close the program, discarding changes. From vim's command mode,
: q ! RET.Exit writing changes. From vim's command mode,
: w q RET.Move the cursor around. Today, usually you can get by with arrow keys -- I haven't been on a system where one thing or another was dicked up in a way that rendered arrow keys unusable in many years, but from Vim's command mode, "h", "j", "k", and ""l.
Enter insert mode to Insert text. From vim's command mode, "i".
Exit insert mode. From vim's insert mode, ESC.
Search for text. From vim's command mode, "/", the text to search for, and RET.
Replace text. From vim's command mode, ":%s/foo/bar/g" to change all instances of foo to bar in a given file.
If you've got that much and you ever find yourself on a system that only has vi available (and it may not be vim), you can at least do the basics.
But the widespread deployment of
nanohas made learning basic vi less important than was once the case. Even very small systems that I've run into tend to havenano.Note that busybox, a popular statically-linked shell often used in a rescue-the-horribly-broken-system scenario, does not have nano but does have a minimal "vi"-alike, so you might still want to know vi in that case.
Thats exactly the kind of stuff I meant.
Micro is somewhere there too.
It was originally
pico, which IIRC was bundled with thepineemail client (a "tree name" pun offelm, an older email client, whose name came from "ELectronic Mail"; this pun extended to many other Unix email clients, like mulberry and such). I think that "pico" probably stood for something like "PIne COmposer". Because it was designed to be particularly approachable, listed the basic commands at the bottom of the screen, and pine was installed on a lot of systems, it kind of got adopted as the "Unix notepad for the terminal"a simple editor that most users could use for lightweight tasks. Then IIRC due to pine predating standard open-source licenses, the nano clone was created to be GPL.
searches
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pico_(text_editor)
Yeah, it's "pine composer", it was indeed bundled with pine. And apparently part of the problem was that the license didn't fully spell out the conditions under which it could be redistributed.
I'm only ever using a command line text editor for changing the odd config file, so for me the benefits of vim or emacs has never outweighed the hassle of figuring them out. So I stick with nano.