I think somebody incorrectly described Atto as comparable to nano/pico, and these comments are dragging it because it's not something that it was never intended as.
> To ease the transition for new users, #NetBSD -current now includes an alternative editor to vi(1) and xedit(1) in its base system, atto(1). https://man.netbsd.org/atto.1
> It is a modeless screen-based editor similar to nano, pico, xedit, or emacs. It is only 48 kilobytes, making it suitable for inclusion in the rescue system.
I think it's fair to call it beginner-friendly, in context of BSD and vi, but maybe indeed it shouldn't be part of the title.
Every time I get launched into nano/pico on a new system I find it very confusing. To use the help menu you need to know that ^-X means Ctrl-X and M-X means Alt-X. Why "Write Out" and not "Save"? And when I "Write Out" I'm offered DOS format or Mac format, and options to Append or Prepend (not even sure what that does).
It's completely bizarre if you're used to something like Notepad or Word.
Most people don't want to learn (in particular not learn sufficiently hard to really improve).
> To ease the transition for new users...
So I would consider it for beginners ("new users") and friendly ("to ease").
Just noting for completeness, as I didn’t catch any mention of it.
However, the code is a mess, with deliberately cryptic identifiers (e.g., `w_doto` for `cursorOffset`), redundant functions (e.g., `vtputc()` is a strict subset of the behavior of `vtpute()`) and a bunch of other weird choices (e.g., deeply-baked assumptions that one byte == one char == one column, even thought Big5 and ShiftJIS were already a thing when it was written).
I tried adding UTF-8 support to mg a couple years ago and basically gave up.
I'll probably be an atto convert.
Despite all those flaws, people keep writing new software in C every day, go figure.
I would prefer ms-edit or nano if I have to edit text files from the terminal.
https://docs.moodle.org/400/en/Atto_editor https://github.com/moodlehq/moodle-editor_atto
You are welcome!
I think it looks great. Syntax highlighting, multi-buffer, splits, standard emacs commands... For new users in the emacs camp, this seems like a nice editor to include in the base install. Even as a vi user, I'd be pretty happy being stuck with this in a rescue system.
The parts of Linux that get integrated into BSDs should not be GPL-licensed, e.g. <https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/c339f4010dea8b0d754f8...> and its siblings use MIT.
https://netbsd.org/about/redistribution.html
As for being compatible. Yes, FSF considers anything permissive to be compatible with their family of licenses. However, it is a one-way relationship in that permissive code can be freely used by GPL projects, but not the other way around as using GPL code would impose further restrictions compared to a permissive license.
Linux:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 321832 Dec 15 2021 /usr/bin/nano
People seem to be missing the point. Also NetBSD has what I call a "real single user mode". Last time I had to boot single user, ed(1) was the only editor available without some work. My guess is this new editor will be useful for people who do not want to deal with ed(1).
I have not seen it yet, but I guess it will be included in 11.1.
Edit: apparently it requires /usr to be mounted though
Very beginner friendly lol. These people have no idea.
Micro is a beginner-friendly console text editor. This isn't.
By this I mean, a beginner to NetBSD is already a far more competent user than a beginner in many other contexts of OS users.
I do think Micro is a nice editor, but we need a tiny, BSD licensed pico/nano for true beginners
Atto has a great man page that would give a user everything they needed to know if they were unfamiliar with emacs keybindings.
tl;dr: I think somebody incorrectly described Atto as comparable to nano/pico, and these comments are dragging it because it's not the thing that it was never meant to be.
How someone jumped to beginner-friendly from that is the real question.