this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2024
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[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Where "intuitive" means "shows important shortcuts on the bottom of the screen".

It's sufficient as a basic text editor, in the sense that it allows me to edit configuration.nix to include helix (a couple of years ago, nvim) without having to learn it because the commands to save and quit are, as said, displayed on the bottom of the screen. That's about the extent of nano's feature set, anyway, it's a text editor, and a simple one as that, doesn't even try to be a code editor.

When it comes to actually being intuitive though I vastly prefer the old DOS-style editors. The editor that shipped with it, as well as the likes of Turbo Pascal. "Press and release alt to get to the menu bar" type of interface: It allows you to have an at least half-way adequate feature set without requiring people to learn shortcuts. If Turbo Pascal displayed all its functions and their shortcuts at the bottom it'd take up more than half of the screen.

Really, "intuitive" when it comes to UI generally means "dumbed down, featureless". Once a program actually has features things quickly become complicated and it's counter-productive to keep things usable for users which aren't willing to set at least a modicum amount of time aside to learn the very basics. The Blender Fundamentals series is what two hours of video. Text editors can get away with less as the feature set isn't as broad but you should be willing to go through at least half of of the tutorial which is going to take 15 minutes or so, both for vimtutor and hx --tutor.