Re: [Nano-devel] What's up with chris, and how to move

[doark]

Hello Chris,

> > I don't think this is particularly popular with the more 
> > passionate folks, and I feel bad about these interactions. But I do
> > feel like there's a very silent majority of folks who just use nano 
> > (including myself :-)) who don't want nano to change toooooo fast
> > from version to version.

I fully appreciate your position, but (the dreaded but), if we are not
willing to roll the stone up the hill we will be imprisoned forever in
the past. Granted, new ideas and ways are not all good, but they're also
not all bad.
For this reason, ESR (if memory serves), recommended that software
should be written to fulfil a purpose and that it's up to the users to
decide how to use it best for their situation.
I recommend that you ask yourself, "Does nano fulfil the purpose it is
supposed to or does feature X improve it?" when you get a feature
request.
You could also create a flag for old nano behaviour in case things
change too much. Or even fork nano and call it subatomic, if you feel
the code base is too large.

> Well...  If I had been nano's maintainer over the past ten years,
> I would have said no to libmagic support,

I don't think he's ever opened a file with no extension. I like
libmagic support and, you can compile it out if you want.

> > We should definitely try changing things up, and 
> > sorry I haven't put forth any recommendations here.  But I'm
> > certainly very interested in what you all might propose.

The only big shortcoming I see is that nano is a poor code editor. It
was not originally designed for that, but it would be a nice light
weight alternative to bigger suites. I'm not saying that there is a lot
to change, being able to spell check only the marked comment, or
preforming a regex replace on only the selected block of text, or
indenting the code an additional four spaces for when you forget a while
or for statement, I use these features all the time.

The only other shortcoming I find distasteful is that nano has no
reformat paragraph support, for when you add or subtract text from
within a paragraph and the lines wrap.

Why have I not made feature requests? Well you've got a bunch in the
works already and I don't want to burden you.
If you looked, I did submit a recommendation to improve the
highlighting of C source files (it is generous, I know), but it is not
yet gone through (the other languages that I know seem to have nice
highlighting).

Why nano as a code editor? Well, nano is, as you pointed out,
assimilating almost every system it can run on, and if you have a
limited system with cc, ld, libc, and nano you can write a small
program to do what you need in a pinch, I've done this a few times to
track down bugs on my Gentoo system.

*Ask yourself, if nano is a good email, code, and general editor, why
install anything else?*

Sincerely, David