Nano is a Free reimplementation of Pico, the editor for the Pine email program. Nano is installed in the default package set of Fedora and Ubuntu, and notably it’s in their live cd systems, and probably other live cds as well. Emacs is apparently deemed too large for these. Vi is there and Nano is the consolation prize for people who prefer Emacs keybindings (which Nano does not support very well). I often end up doing rescue and systems administration work using live cds and, as an Emacs user, always curse Nano.

> Emacs vs. Vim is so… boring.

Well, maybe, but I wasn’t actually comparing them in an emacs is better than vim sense. I was comparing their popularity which I find interesting. I guess others find it interesting too.

> (paraphrasing) – people use vim because it is installed everywhere

Okay, that is interesting information, but there is nothing I can do about it at my firm – emacs is already available on all servers.

> Get stuff done with emacs, don’t bother trying to convert people.

Why not? If people in my team are solving problems using the emacs framework that otherwise I would have to solve, that is good for me.

> Maybe it could be hooked into a typical sysadmins workflow better?
> Maybe there needs to be a better tutorial on how to use TRAMP?

Er, possibly. But I’m not a sysadmin and I don’t know any. So it is difficult for me to empathise with them and think about the problems they need to solve. I suspect it is a better use of my time to try and make it better for programmers.

@zhangda – it is a good start at least I got my mother to use emacs + org-mode with cua-mode but I don’t think she still uses it. Maybe it is worth going through a few other standard bindings and fixing them up as per my previous post

@Mike – I’m not surprised that many people use vim – it is always available as Jonathan points out above and it’s not that bad really. Vim wizards are almost as quick at basic editing tasks as emacs wizards

I haven’t any experience of nano but I’m surprised there are Unix-like systems with nano and without some sort of vi-a-like.

And I completely agree about the new font engine. Emacs 23 is finally an absolute pleasure to use. Previously my experience was slightly marred by the ugly fonts.

@James – nice summary, thanks for adding it to the wiki.

I don’t think Nano is ‘a fine editor’. It’s one of those that do an evil half-arsed imitation of Emacs keybindings. Some of the very elementary ones work, but e.g. C-k works in a different way, which causes endless problems for Emacs users, word wrapping is all wrong, search is unfathomable for an Emacs user etc. If you want a minimal editor with an Emacs-like interface, use zile. Nano is for people who were conditioned on Pine/Pico.

Emacs could probably improve its chances quite a bit by improving the most offensive parts of the UI. I’m not talking about keybindings, but e.g. better integration with the toolkit (Gtk on Linux/Unix), revamp Customize. Fortunately font rendering is finally there with Emacs 23.

A majority of people whom I have talked to about their editor preference say they choose vi/vim because it is likely installed on any given *nix system. This is especially good for sysadmins, who typically would need to edit config files, on a variety of machines. Great, it works for them.

Get stuff done with emacs, don’t bother trying to convert people. If you want emacs to become the most popular linux editor, why not see about integrating it with linux better? Maybe the modes for editing config files could be made better? Maybe it could be hooked into a typical sysadmins workflow better? Maybe there needs to be a better tutorial on how to use TRAMP? Food for thought.

Within my team of 10 the ratio is 2 to 1 in favour of Vim but one of the Emacs users is a convert

The non-Emacs to Emacs ratio is 9:1. This is made up of jEdit, TextMate, Eclipse, Coda, and probably a few other oddballs.

There are a couple non developers (operations guys) who use Emacs as well, but I stuck to coders since I have a better idea of who uses what.

Of course, being and advocate for Emacs, I’ve tried to get people to consider it, but few have. They’re either unwilling to take the productivity hit while they adapt, or are put off by the complexity.