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bahua
7y

The problem I have with atom, vscode, sublime, and notepad++ is that none are available on the command line over SSH, inside tmux. And that's where I do the vast majority of my text editing.

The first text editor I used on the command line was pico, the technological successor of which is nano. I used it because when I was in college in the late '90s, we used pine for our email, and pico was the default editor for pine.

When I got my first job out of college in 2000, I found out about vi, and very quickly fell in love with it, and its technological successor: vim.

The only reason I've never gotten into emacs is because I've never wanted for more than vi/vim. And also because as a system administrator, I'm logging into dozens, of not hundreds of servers a day. While vi or vim is guaranteed to be on all of them, emacs is not.

So, for me, the use of a desktop text editor like the ones I mentioned at the beginning of this post, just doesn't make sense to me. I almost never edit files that live on the computer where I'm sitting, and I'm not interested in doing a commit/push every single time I want to rerun a script.

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atom

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Comments
  • 2
    7y
    you can local/remote mirror or use sftp to access the files too, also for just text/config editing ofc. something like nano is much faster/easier
  • 4
    7y
    @JoshBent

    ie: vim :)

    But I still find vim to be far more powerful and flexible than any of those desktop apps, especially so, since I lose zero functionality when I switch environments.
  • 0
    7y
    Do you use anything that copies your dotfiles to the server when you run ssh (so that you can take your .vimrc with you) or do you use vi/vim with the default configuration?
  • 1
    7y
    @shellbug

    If I use a particular machine enough, I paste in my vimrc and bash_profile from my keepass.
  • 1
    7y
    @bahua well you're a sysadmin, for e.g. webdev sublime,vscode, .. are objectively better and offer much more, so they do have their use
  • 0
    7y
    @JoshBent

    I do lots of programming though. The lack of powerful modality of those other apps, along with having to be run on a different machine than where it matters, makes them objectively inferior for any use, for me.
  • 1
    7y
    @JoshBent I disagree. I can do the same they do in vim.

    But this is a pointless discussion. People should use the tools that better help them do their jobs. For me that's vim.
  • 0
    7y
    @JoshBent

    Also, I am a sysadmin by history. But I am now a full time programmer.
  • 0
    7y
    Why not use ed?
  • 0
    7y
    @Linux

    Because I simply never learned it.
  • 1
    7y
    @bahua
    I dont see how someone can learn it :)
    I want to, but I dont know where to start
  • 1
    7y
    @shellbug

    Not trying to start a fight about vim (had enough of them already to not care) and tried to edit in a quick ending sentence into my previous message, to make it more clear, but this summarizes it pretty well

    https://web.archive.org/web/...

    though I would now replace sublime with vscode, as sublime got completely crushed by vscode development and easier / more advanced plugin development
  • 1
    7y
    Easy. I used SSHFS once and it worked like a charm! Basically, you can mount the remote filesystem using SFTP. And then, you can use Atom to edit the files (and it makes your job easier thanks to the plugins/packages you might have installed).
  • 2
    7y
    @hacker

    Sure, but you can't use sshfs to run commands on the remote server, with all the environment variables the user needs, in effect. Without that, I see no reason to avoid logging directly into the server and opening the files there.
  • 1
    7y
    @bahua fair point. Although, you could always open a new ssh connection using another terminal :/
  • 3
    7y
    @hacker

    In which case, there's little point in using a desktop app, in my opinion.
  • 2
    7y
    @bahua tbf it's pretty amazing that you can just operate entirely from the terminal
  • 3
    7y
    @JoshBent

    It's where I live.
  • 0
    7y
    Using VSCode on terminal is a new oxymoron.
  • 0
    7y
    So you don't like graphical text editors that don't run on non-graphycal environments?

    Makes sense.
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