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.
> 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 a part of the title.
I can't imagine a beginner really knowing what is going on in nano.
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.
> I can't imagine a beginner really knowing what is going on in nano.
When you launch nano without a file loaded, there's a notice at the bottom of the screen: [ Welcome to nano. For basic help, type Ctrl+G. ]
Press 'Ctrl + G' and it takes you to a help page that says, among other things, "Shortcuts are written as follows: Control-key sequences are notated with a '^' and can be entered either by using the Ctrl key or pressing the Esc key twice. Meta-key sequences are notated with 'M-' and can be entered using either the Alt, Cmd, or Esc key, depending on your keyboard setup."
You can't force a user to read docs or learn how the programs they're using work, but this is a reasonable attempt.
That's because no one knows their history anymore.
Nano was a (bloated as usual) GNU clone of Pico. Its only reason for existing is GPL freedumb nonsense that was popular back in the day. It copied the UX of Pico.
Pico was not developed as a standalone editor; rather it was the builtin editor for the Pine email reader. Hence the weird keybindings — it followed the UX of the email client.
Pico stood for PIne COmposer.
It became a simple universal editor because vi and emacs sucked and for some reason no one felt it necessary to invent something better.
Users repurposed the editor from a mail client because it was already there. Nearly every university Sun box in the 90s had Pine installed for reading email.
It was written by the same guy that invented IMAP at the University of Washington.
Can't wait for the Rust clone of Nano then the cycle will be complete.
Just FYI, they did try to improve that a bit. Release notes for nano v8.0:
> Command-line option --modernbindings (-/) makes ^Q quit, ^X cut, ^C copy, ^V paste, ^Z undo, ^Y redo, ^O open a file, ^W write a file, ^R replace, ^G find again, ^D find again backwards, ^A set the mark, ^T jump to a line, ^P show the position, and ^E execute.
> Above modern bindings are activated also when the name of nano's executable (or a symlink to it) starts with the letter "e".
So if you symlink nano to /usr/bin/editor and make it the default $EDITOR, then you now do get CUA-like bindings by default.
There’s still a lot of more things they perhaps should enable by default. I don’t know whether you’ve looked into .nanorc, but you can turn on stuff like syntax highlighting and line numbers, it’s just all off by default.
I don’t actually use nano myself, but I was really taken aback by how featureful it is when you look closely. Not st the level of Vim or Emacs, but more than expected. I basically stumbled upon someone on Reddit /r/unixporn that "riced" their nanorc and it piqued my curiosity.
For most people though, I think micro is a better fit than nano if you want a terminal CUA-style editor.
> nothing in the README file says the point is to be "beginner-friendly"
"for users who are not accustomed to text editors with separate insertion and editing modes"[0] could be construed as "beginner-friendly" (albeit with some squinting, I'd concede.)
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.
I used pico or nano as my everyday unix coding editor for something like fifteen years, starting in the late '90s. It was just fine. I couldn't stand vi and didn't see the point of emacs; I type faster than I think, so I never found that text-editing was enough of a bottleneck to make sophisticated automation worth the effort.
I only stopped using pico/nano after writing my own editor, which blatantly stole pico's interface design.
Not only that, but you constantly feel like Idiocracy is playing out in real time, and that everyone else around you is closer to monkeys than a rational empathetic human... it's exhausting, lonely and debilitating. Then you realize there are people much smarter than you, and you wonder how they must feel.
Reminds me of that House MD episode where the delivery driver was a secret genius who was abusing DXM to dumb himself down just to feel happy.
"For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief."
True, many a junior dev I've had to work with was convinced they're the smartest person in the room, good at what they do but so full of themselves they're unable to adapt, acquire new knowledge or consider new paradigms.
Learning requires some amount of humbleness, to accept you don't know everything.
Well nano pico atto ... the name makes it comparable. Why would you expect people to not draw that connection?
I think the main take-away is that vi/vim is too complicated for many folks. I use nano a lot on the commandline. For quick editing it is so much more convenient than vim.
I've used mg and find it generally useful. It's my default editor pretty much everywhere.
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 guess it has poor (or nonexistent) unicode support in 48kb. My only gripe with NetBSD was its lacking UTF-8 support for many core tools (eg. wscons, vi when I used it as daily driver)
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.
NetBSD is IMHO the most beginner friendly nix out there. It's small, lean, and well documented. You could know almost nothing about nix, read their handbook, and come the other side half competent. Linux (my daily driver) by comparison is a constantly moving target with no single source for coherent documentation and where anything goes. FreeBSD is better, but when I last used the handbook it had plenty of outdated chapters, and it seemed like everything had so many different ways of doing things. NetBSD had small elegant solutions, and recompiling your entire system from scratch was a pleasant experience that didn't have me trapped in dependency hell or even needing to consult documentation after I got started.
> NetBSD is IMHO the most beginner friendly nix out there.
I'd argue that OpenBSD would be worthy of that title, too. It is incredibly easy, elegant, and simple. The thoughtfulness that goes into all the base system utilities in OpenBSD is so appreciated.
FreeBSD is kinda somewhere in between Open/NetBSD and Linux in my opinion. Their docs are OK, but the handbook leaves a lot to be desired, and they don't seem to have nearly nice little quality of life utilities that OpenBSD has out of the box.
Oh no! What does that mean for using Wine to play games? From what I understand a lot of Windows games (especially older ones) require 32-bit Wine, which requires 32-bit libs (which I assume requires 32-bit Kernel support). It's the sole reason I run 64- and 32-bit multilib on my Arch box: playing Windows games.
64 bit Linux can run 32 bit programs just like Windows. Modern Wine is using a WoW64 model where the 64 bit host code loads 32 bit DLLs when some app needs them.
It's funny because I learned enough vi to be useful specifically because of NetBSD forcing you to change "rc_configured=NO" to "rc_configured=YES" in rc.conf.
I think there are a lot of people who are not comfortable with vi. Its much the same reason that some Linux distros default to nano.
I spend a fair bit of time on Linux command lines, but I use a mix of different TUI and GUI editors (including ones that work over ssh for editing files on servers), and none of those are vi. I can manage vi if I must, but its an effort and distracts from the task because I have to think about how to do things in vi.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
I always thought the essential feature of an emacs was its extensibility. I never felt that emacs was just a collection of keybinds and split buffer windows.
Note, I'm not talking about Lisp per se, just some kind of mechanic within the editor to allow the user to make extensions to it.
To be beginner friendly they should call it text editor. Or notepad, or quickwriter. No beginner is going to guess that something called Atto lets you write words on a computer.
>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.
The beginner-friendly label seems to be obscuring what atto actually is, which is a very small Emacs-like editor meant to live in the base system. At roughly 48 KB and under 2,000 lines of C, it fits places nano and the larger alternatives do not, especially a rescue environment or single-user mode where you still need something more usable than ed or a stripped-down vi. That constraint also explains the choices people are arguing about here: Emacs bindings come with the design, and a permissively licensed C program can be maintained with the tools NetBSD already ships, unlike a Go editor such as micro. For someone new to NetBSD but already comfortable at a Unix terminal, that is a reasonable trade. It is less a first editor for a general beginner than a safety net that happens to be approachable once you are already in that world.
> 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.
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.
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.
For many, it is indeed about what they call "muscle memory". Almost impossible to change after so many years. And therefore I hope everyone would provide keybinding alternatives generally (shouldn't be that hard).
UNIX doesn't exist anymore, and C has lot of negative points (easy to create buffer overflows, integer overflows, use-after-free, and other vulnerabilities).
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.
unless someone can offer a custom keybinding mechanism.. and custom dynamic functions the user can bind to..
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 a 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.
When you launch nano without a file loaded, there's a notice at the bottom of the screen: [ Welcome to nano. For basic help, type Ctrl+G. ]
Press 'Ctrl + G' and it takes you to a help page that says, among other things, "Shortcuts are written as follows: Control-key sequences are notated with a '^' and can be entered either by using the Ctrl key or pressing the Esc key twice. Meta-key sequences are notated with 'M-' and can be entered using either the Alt, Cmd, or Esc key, depending on your keyboard setup."
You can't force a user to read docs or learn how the programs they're using work, but this is a reasonable attempt.
Nano was a (bloated as usual) GNU clone of Pico. Its only reason for existing is GPL freedumb nonsense that was popular back in the day. It copied the UX of Pico.
Pico was not developed as a standalone editor; rather it was the builtin editor for the Pine email reader. Hence the weird keybindings — it followed the UX of the email client.
Pico stood for PIne COmposer.
It became a simple universal editor because vi and emacs sucked and for some reason no one felt it necessary to invent something better.
Users repurposed the editor from a mail client because it was already there. Nearly every university Sun box in the 90s had Pine installed for reading email.
It was written by the same guy that invented IMAP at the University of Washington.
Can't wait for the Rust clone of Nano then the cycle will be complete.
> Command-line option --modernbindings (-/) makes ^Q quit, ^X cut, ^C copy, ^V paste, ^Z undo, ^Y redo, ^O open a file, ^W write a file, ^R replace, ^G find again, ^D find again backwards, ^A set the mark, ^T jump to a line, ^P show the position, and ^E execute.
> Above modern bindings are activated also when the name of nano's executable (or a symlink to it) starts with the letter "e".
So if you symlink nano to /usr/bin/editor and make it the default $EDITOR, then you now do get CUA-like bindings by default.
There’s still a lot of more things they perhaps should enable by default. I don’t know whether you’ve looked into .nanorc, but you can turn on stuff like syntax highlighting and line numbers, it’s just all off by default.
I don’t actually use nano myself, but I was really taken aback by how featureful it is when you look closely. Not st the level of Vim or Emacs, but more than expected. I basically stumbled upon someone on Reddit /r/unixporn that "riced" their nanorc and it piqued my curiosity.
For most people though, I think micro is a better fit than nano if you want a terminal CUA-style editor.
At least "Uncut" has been renamed to "Paste".
"for users who are not accustomed to text editors with separate insertion and editing modes"[0] could be construed as "beginner-friendly" (albeit with some squinting, I'd concede.)
[0] https://man.netbsd.org/atto.1
I only stopped using pico/nano after writing my own editor, which blatantly stole pico's interface design.
Reminds me of that House MD episode where the delivery driver was a secret genius who was abusing DXM to dumb himself down just to feel happy.
"For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief."
Most people don't want to learn (in particular not learn sufficiently hard to really improve).
Learning requires some amount of humbleness, to accept you don't know everything.
> To ease the transition for new users...
So I would consider it for beginners ("new users") and friendly ("to ease").
I think the main take-away is that vi/vim is too complicated for many folks. I use nano a lot on the commandline. For quick editing it is so much more convenient than vim.
https://man.openbsd.org/mg
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.
Well, sometimes we call the cursor "the dot."
> atto is not the standard editor.
Hah. That is clearly a reference to https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html
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.
I'd argue that OpenBSD would be worthy of that title, too. It is incredibly easy, elegant, and simple. The thoughtfulness that goes into all the base system utilities in OpenBSD is so appreciated.
FreeBSD is kinda somewhere in between Open/NetBSD and Linux in my opinion. Their docs are OK, but the handbook leaves a lot to be desired, and they don't seem to have nearly nice little quality of life utilities that OpenBSD has out of the box.
I spend a fair bit of time on Linux command lines, but I use a mix of different TUI and GUI editors (including ones that work over ssh for editing files on servers), and none of those are vi. I can manage vi if I must, but its an effort and distracts from the task because I have to think about how to do things in vi.
My favourite editor is mcedit, which you get by installing mc (midnight commander)
Like nano but (IMO) easier to use with a lot more features
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:
per the link, atto(1) is 48 kilobytes.You are welcome!
https://github.com/hughbarney/atto
Note, I'm not talking about Lisp per se, just some kind of mechanic within the editor to allow the user to make extensions to it.
https://docs.moodle.org/400/en/Atto_editor https://github.com/moodlehq/moodle-editor_atto
I feel like most people who even know about NetBSD would be technical enough to at least function at a basic level in something like vi or 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.
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.
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.
https://github.com/micro-editor/MICRO
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.
How someone jumped to beginner-friendly from that is the real question.
For many, it is indeed about what they call "muscle memory". Almost impossible to change after so many years. And therefore I hope everyone would provide keybinding alternatives generally (shouldn't be that hard).
Despite all those flaws, people keep writing new software in C every day, go figure.
Or ARM? It's from the 1980s! So old!
[1] https://github.com/microsoft/edit
That's… not what "standard" means.
I would prefer ms-edit or nano if I have to edit text files from the terminal.
Not "40 years ago". Non-stop all day every day for 55 years.
The fact that you personally don't use it today is as irrelevant as if you were ranting about "why doesn't Linux have a Start menu!? It's 2026!!!"