I’ve been a fan of nano for as long as I’ve been editing a lot of text files remotely (soon to be approximately three years now). The learning curve was fairly gentle, and I gradually memorized the shortcuts I found to be useful. It was a good fit.
With any programming I do, I often need to make small, frequent edits to files– this is just my style. I do the majority of my actual coding in Eclipse and/or with programs like gedit, then paste files into nano or FTP them to the remote host if necessary. Obviously I can’t compare Eclipse to nano, but strictly speaking about gedit, I’ll freely admit that I’ve always been much more comfortable with GUI text editors than with nano. Of course, once the file is on the remote host, I test the results, make small modifications to my file(s) via SSH, and re-test. I generally don’t bother to go back to the IDE and/or GUI unless I’m really stumped or I have to do some major refactoring.
A few months ago, I started an internship in which I develop software and web applications for embedded Linux modules. I was, of course, right at home with the job description, but yet I still feel a twinge of horror remembering the first day I worked on some PHP files on the development kit.
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