HackiNews

• chipotle_coyote
  To promote this to a top-level comment, because I think it's important context: nothing in the README file says the point is to be "beginner-friendly". As far as I can tell, that's something that Hacker News or whoever submitted this used as a description. Neither the word "beginner" nor the word "friendly" appear in the README; its goal is to "be the smallest functional Emacs in less than 2000 lines of C."

  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.

  • luke8086
    OP here, I just paraphrased the announcement:

    > 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.

  • drummojg
    I would never drag pico. I wrote software that's been packaged in Linux distros in pico. And I lost the urge to be The Smartest Guy In The [Room/Mailing List/Forum] a long, long time ago.
  • insanetake
    From the announcement

    > To ease the transition for new users...

    So I would consider it for beginners ("new users") and friendly ("to ease").

  • moron4hire
    I do think it's weird they keep using "Emacs" in a way that apparently just means "text editor," as if Emacs is the Kleenex of text editors.
• mig39
  Is this the same editor that is used in the open-source Moodle LMS?

  https://docs.moodle.org/400/en/Atto_editor https://github.com/moodlehq/moodle-editor_atto

• MonkeyClub
  OpenBSD also has an Emacs-y non-extensible editor, mg(1):

  https://man.openbsd.org/mg

  Just noting for completeness, as I didn’t catch any mention of it.

• codedokode
  Why are they using weird key combinations instead of traditional Ctrl + S, Ctrl + A, Ctrl + C used in desktop applications? Why every console program wants to be a special snowflake and not use standard key combinations, please explain. I do not care that 40 years ago someone used Ctrl + C to send SIGINT, it is 2026 now.

  • elehack
    Atto's default key bindings match Emacs, which is about as standard as you get for non-modal editing keys in older Unix traditions.

    • cowlevel
      and isn't at all beginner friendly
    • pjmlp
      I would assert Wordstar style are equally as old.
    • codedokode
      Emacs is probably older than me why should we care about what they used in 80s?

      • pjmlp
        Depends, do you care about UNIX and C, as products from 1970's?
      • MonkeyClub
        I see you’re using Latin characters...
  • superbaconman
    I think you're underestimating just how "standard" many of the shortcuts are when mapped against a standard shell.
  • athorax
    These are about as standard as you can get when it comes to Unix keybindings
  • currysausage
    You might enjoy the new Microsoft Edit [1].

    [1] https://github.com/microsoft/edit

  • rustyhancock
    Because this isn't beginner friendly it's a new micro Emacs and those are standard libreadline/emacs bindings.
  • boricj
    That sounds like Emacs. Wouldn't know though, given that I dislike vim too.

    I would prefer ms-edit or nano if I have to edit text files from the terminal.

  • insanetake
    These key combinations have been used for 50 years, so I'm not sure why you call them non-standard. They're just a different standard from what you're used to.
• Levitating
  NetBSD isn't the first to use the name. My pet text editor is also called atto: https://git.levitati.ng/Levitating/atto
• Gracana
  Who knew a little emacs-like editor would be so controversial.

  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.

• markusQi
  The source code and README are here: https://github.com/NetBSD/src/tree/trunk/usr.bin/atto

  You are welcome!

  • passthejoe
    The dev calls it "Atto Emacs"

    https://github.com/hughbarney/atto

• itomato
  NetBSD has beginners?

  • officeplant
    Currently seeing an influx of interest from new people who want an OS with strong anti-ai stances.
  • graemep
    Beginners to NetBSD who are not vi users.
  • alnsn
    You can ask Claude to cross-complie, prepare an image (aka install) and run an emulator. I tried exactly this yesterday and in about an hour I could attach to tmux and run tests on emulated riscv64 board.

    • daishi55
      Careful, they might ban you!
• OnlineTux
  Why not just add nano?

  • Matl
    Because the BSD's are reflexively anti GNU.

    • ninjin
      nano(1) is GPLv3 last time I checked and that imposes more restrictions than most (all?) of the rest of the code in NetBSD. It is not about being "reflexive", it is a violation of the very ethos of the project. Gnu rejecting non-free licenses from their own distributions is not "reflexive", it is simply not in line with what they want to achieve and one should respect that.

      • Matl
        Unless they modify it, the GPL really doesn't impact them. AFAIK FSF considers most BSD/MIT style licences to be compatible. It's the other way around where things gets stuck. Unless they need Linux GPU/WIFI/BT drivers to make things work, of course. Then it's fine.

        • brewmarche
          > Unless they need Linux GPU/WIFI/BT drivers to make things work, of course. Then it's fine.

          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.

        • ninjin
          Modification is the whole point of open source: "Unless you want to modify Windows, the closeness does not impact you". If you want to learn about how NetBSD looks at things, there is this page:

          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.

  • jmclnx
    Size:

    Linux:

         -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 321832 Dec 15  2021 /usr/bin/nano
    

    per the link, atto(1) is 48 kilobytes.
• bmacho
  [delayed]
• Rucadi
  For me the most easy-to-use editor for cli / ssh and relatively lightweight is https://github.com/sinelaw/fresh everybody can just use it intuitively.

  • hnlmorg
    I’ll take a look at this. But it’s worth noting that NetBSDs goal was to have something small enough that it can be used in a recovery shell.
  • Daunk
    I think they'd have your head on a plate if you suggested a vibe coded text editor.
  • stonogo
    There is nothing intuitive about any text editor.
• cowlevel
  To be beginner friendly they should call it text editor. Or notepad, or quickwriter. I don't get the open source naming conventions.
• jmclnx
  >making it suitable for inclusion in the rescue system

  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.

• IshKebab
  > Perhaps all that needs to be known to use atto at a basic level is that holding the control key, pressing x, then pressing w will write the currently open file, and holding the control key, pressing x, then pressing c will exit the editor.

  Very beginner friendly lol. These people have no idea.

  Micro is a beginner-friendly console text editor. This isn't.

  • chipotle_coyote
    Nothing in the README file says the point is to be "beginner-friendly"; as far as I can tell, that's something that Hacker News or whoever submitted this used as a description. Neither the word "beginner" nor the word "friendly" appear in the README; its goal is to "be the smallest fuctional Emacs in less than 2000 lines of C."

    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.

  • hnlmorg
    I don’t think NetBSD and yourself are using the term in the same context.

    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.

  • passthejoe
    Micro is MIT licensed, so it should be shippable in NetBSD base.

    https://github.com/micro-editor/MICRO

  • yearolinuxdsktp
    Project headline is “The smallest functional Emacs in less than 2000 lines of C.”

    How someone jumped to beginner-friendly from that is the real question.

  • CodeCompost
    It's using keystrokes inspired by emacs. Ok.

    • pwdisswordfishq
      As we all know, beginners love Emacs keystrokes.
  • yearolinuxdsktp
    100% this. Two-key chords for standards tasks, that’s modal, not friendly for beginners and unnecessary cognitive load for intermediate users.