I think most people (including myself) prefer a minimal desktop by default, and then proceed to install only the software they need. Nevertheless, it always surprises me when I log in to a system that doesn’t have vim.
For almost all users, especially beginners, nano is just simpler faster and better. A lot of distributions are bundling it, and I am finding indeed systems without vim at all.
Although most of the times while vim is not installed vi is. Even often together with nano.
Man I tried to use vi once because I started with vim and wanted to see what all it was before, and holy shit vim really is IMPROVED
Especially for beginners,
microwould be even better.deleted by creator
I hate itdeleted by creator
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Ok i think i overeacted. I couldn’t figure out how to exit it, so i assumed it was like vim. Needed to exit Termux manually (which i hate) but the ctrl+s & q is easy. Will consider it another option to remember like moving from
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I’m surprised there aren’t more distros that come packaged with it. If someone’s used a graphical text editor in the past decade, then they know how to use micro. The only distro I know of that has it by default is Garuda.
I disagree. Don’t get me wrong, vim is amazing and all that, but I think nano is easier for new users to grok out of the box, making it a better choice most of the time. What it lacks in features it makes up for in transparency.
100% agree about the minimal set of desktop apps, though. That drives me crazy.
Just my 0.02$.
Edit: silly mistakes and clarification
In all distro I tried, I always found Vi.
Vi is standardized in both POSIX and Single Unix Specification.
You’ve never used a minimal Linux distro for cloud servers then. Some don’t ship any text editors. Others ship only nano. Part of the reason why I think learn vim because vi(m) is everywhere argument is retarded. It’s factually incorrect.
but they do contains vi
less, I don’t remember what distro it was, but there wasn’tless. There wasmorethough.Sometimes, more is less.
There’s a LESS_IS_MORE env var for
lesswhich makes it behave likemore. Or something like that. Check the manpageThere is a variable in less source code which keep status if less should behave like more
But when will “then” be “now”?
Tuesday.
SOON
Will the future be better tomorrow?
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It was, but it was (and still is) a Unix tool. I believe POSIX still requires that
morebe provided (even if it’s justlesssecretly).The original Unix
morecould only go forwards. Someone wanted to make something likemorethat could go both forwards and backwards, so he called itlessas a joke (because “less” is a “backwards more”). For the past 40 years, everyone’s realized thatlessis much better than the originalmore, so nobody uses the original any more.(MSDOS took the idea of “more” before “less” caught on).
Also, sometimes they have an old version of less. There was a change in the past, I don’t know, five or so years that made the “exit if less than one page” flag behave better. I don’t remember the specifics but it made using it as a fit pager way better. It used to be that it was difficult to have it act like cat when the output was less than a page. But newer versions support it.
What distro was this?
git not installed in ubuntu based distro was the shock for me.
I believe ubuntu doesn’t have it installed by default.
Ubuntu wants you to use snap for all your app needs. I think their plan is to make repos only for os maintenance and installation and nothing else.
Git. I feel like that is a pretty important part of any linux os nowadays
htop
What’s the point to install htop when top is being preinstalled like 99% of time?
Much easier and faster to get useful information out of htop.
With all my respect, there is nothing difficult to get information from top.
KDE Connect on KDE distros, just feels part of the KDE experience
git really should be installed by default these days
A Doom-clone. I mean, come on.
Seriously tho, Gparted for how useful it is.
git isn’t in Arch’s base-devel
Damn, I am quite sure it’s in Debians build-essentials!
Nano (or pico). I had to use vi one time 😭
Which distro doesn’t ship nano? I’ve only ever seen this in embedded or docker contexts.
Condolences for your vile experiences, though.
I think Debian doesn’t cause I used it in some containers
The Debian LXC containers ship without nano, the normal (net/dvd/cd) install have nano.
Debian does ship nano not vim.
I think it was OpenWRT
Yeah I find that nano is on basically everything but alpine or other minimalist distros for containers. As long as I have access to it on the host I’m doing okay.
🤕 <– he was forced to use vi
How did you get out of it?
By becoming a CTO and having an early retirement. Or not at all.
I remember using nano in college when I was a baby dev. I would write everything locally then paste into nano. I don’t remember if the professor gave us an FTP link or if I was just trying around but I pasted the server address into the file explorer (I think nautilus, I don’t remember) and it managed to connect. It made it all so easy.
Good times, writing assembly in nano lmao!
tmux, htop, vim
What distros don’t include tmux and vim? Ubuntu has had them for at least a decade.
by default?
My work laptop came with Ubuntu preinstaled and didn’t have tmux nor htop.
Vim is not present by default in at least debian and arch. Although vi is present in every distribution I believe.
I can see that being the case for the Desktop variant. For the Server variant you get
vimandtmuxout of the box.
I was surprised that gnome ships with comes with it in default.
Traceroute.
Tracer T
Does anyone know why this isn’t included?
It’s always so useful for network stuff.
I am surprised that vi is often available, but not vim. It’s really annoying on many RHEL based distros, because I am so used to typing vim. Otherwise there is just git I deem essential.
Definitely not limited to RHEL!
Nowadays vi is just a symlink to vim.tiny, so you’re actually running vim (in vi mode).
No. If you have vim installed that’s true on many (some?) systems. As I said some distros have vi available, but not vim which is the annoying part.
The original vi has not been maintained for many years. Most distributions, including Debian, Fedora, etc, use a version of Vim which (mostly) is similar to how Vi was.
From Fedoras wiki:
“On Fedora, Vim (specifically the vim-minimal package) is also used to provide /bin/vi. This vi command provides no syntax highlighting for opened files, by default, just like the original vi editor. The vim-minimal package comes pre-installed on Fedora.”From the vim-tiny package description on Debian:
“This package contains a minimal version of Vim compiled with no GUI and a small subset of features. This package’s sole purpose is to provide the vi binary for base installations.”R.I.P. Bram Moolenaar. You made me think of it when you said go is unmaintained. I went to vim.org to see who is taking over vim but the security certificate is expired.
It reminded me of this grim realization I had in my grandparents house. They were getting old, I think one or maybe both were in a nursing home by then. The house was falling apart as they were. I was going up the deck stairs and a stair broke under my foot, luckily one of the very low ones. Some dishes had some mold on them in the cabinet. And now going to vim.org, the cert is broken.
You are actually correct. I just checked the manifest of RHEL and it provides vim-minimal and not vi like I assumed.
I noticed that it behaves a bit different than the version available on AIX for example which for sure uses real vi, but I never gave it a second thought. Interesting.
Also OpenBSD use different versions, I’m guessing their vi is the original since it can’t handle utf-8. And iirc ex(1) is also a vim variant on Linux. I’ve never met anyone who actually uses ex though. ed(1) I think is just GNU ed. I am not certain about these versions though.
Yeah, at least some distros have VIM tiny or whatever it’s called so my muscle memory benefits me.
Most distros I mess with have busybox installed, which as vi in it, but yeah sudo apt install vim is one of the first commands I run.
Solution - learn using vi. You already did most of the work by learmjng vim.
There is not really anything to learn. It is just lacking some useful features and shortcuts which make it slower to use. It’s still much better than nothing.
Usually my biggest issue is that I am so used to write
vimovervi. At least for small edits.
netstat curl and git
netstatis mostly deprecated and superseded by thesscommand.I had an error with Xampp starting the Apache server by not having netstat installed
Wait?
ss? why haven’t I heard of this?Maybe you also haven’t heard about the
ipcommand which replaces various commands such asifconfig(replaced byip a).Oh, I’m familiar with
ipcommand. I’ve just completely missedss.
gitrsynchtop`Add
tmuxand you’ve got almost everything I install on a fresh install of any distro.Almost everything. The last thing is
vim.
