The image is misleading. The brain sizes represent the amount of grey matter it takes to operate the editor. The nano guy has plenty of brain power left over for things like hygiene, breathing and basic reasoning.
Programmer Humor
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vim guy, emacs guy look big brain. me brain smol. me bathe yesterday, thank you.
Vim users: "I feel bad for you"
Nano users: "I don't think about you at all"
Nano users :
Me no think
Nano users have more important things to think about, saying this as an nvim user
I don't get why there's so much prejudice towards nano users in the Linux community, people act like nano is useless but it performs its job well, and it does it without being large or overly complicated.
nano gang represent😎
I can use Vim, it was the choice for years. But I actually like using nano because it's what I need and all I need.
Honestly nano is perfect for quick edits. Vim and Emacs are powerful, but sometimes you just want to open a config file, change one line, and exit without fighting the editor. 😄
This is what i use vim for. Vim doesn't necessarily have to be a full blown ide with 30 plugins
Vim does not just work if you don't know how to get into edit mode and save and quit from there. Nano even has built in search and replace.
Funny story, when i first got into linux (almost a decade ago), I accidentally opened nano pasting some random command off the internet and didn't know how to close it because I didn't know what the ^ symbol meant.
I had successfully been quiting (and using) vim for a few months at this point.
Fortunately, every computer comes equipped with an "exit editor" button. It's on the back, attached to the power supply unit. You just flick the switch. Exits every editor known to humanity. /j
I do appreciate this in nano. It helps me complete the new container config occasionally required to install vim.
I'm team nano, I'm not smart enough to use the other two and for whenever I need to open a text file in terminal only environment once every year I can remember how to navigate nano. So I'll keep using nano.
I love nano. I used to do tech support for a Linux-based content management system (before SAaS take took off).. The customer sysadmins were sometimes whichever engineer was volun-told to do it, so competency varied wildly.
I helped mostly with installs. This might be the poor newbie sysadmin's first time on the command line. Nano was my go-to suggestion for editing config files--all the commands are right there! Much less intimidating than vi or emacs for a newbie.
Nano you can pick up in ten minutes and master in an afternoon. By that time you’re still reading the intro to vim or eMacs.
Never ceases to amaze me how people get so exercised over a text editor.
I remember the time when Linux jokes were about audio drivers and X11 config files, but audio has long been working out of the box, and X11 is already dead and cremated.
Even recompiling kernel now takes around five minutes instead of two hours, so that joke is irrelevant too.
So all we are left with is timeless discussion of which text editor is the best, and dumping on Windows.
This has been a lighthearted fake rivalry for as long as these text editors have existed.
nano is just a text editor, I use it as a text editor, it has keybindings on screen by default, no need to config or memorise, why bother? (for text editing, not whatever people use vim or emacs for)
I use micro. It's 1000x better.
Today I learned about the existence of "milli" and "kilo", both of which are terminal-based text editors! Quite interesting. I wonder if there are any more SI unit prefix text editors...
micro enters the chat.
Static, portable binary with no dependencies.
Out of the box:
- Syntax highlighting
- Multi-line cursors like Sublime Text
- Mouse support (works incredibly well)
- Splits and tabs for working on multiple files
- Diff gutter
- Copy and paste with system clipboard
- Cross-platform (runs basically on anything that Go does)
- Sane key binds (ctrl-s, ctrl-c, ctrl-v, ctrl-z, ctrl-x, etc)
- Terminal emulator
- Plugin system to extend it
- And much much more
I have nothing to do with the project but this binary is the absolute best. curl or wget to any host and away you go with effectively a Sublime Text / VSCode like in the terminal. It’s as simple as nano and as functional as a well configured and extended vim.
It’s baffling it’s not more well known and not installed by default on major distros.
Helix:

nano is usually built in. Adding another one is just redundant if all you're using it for is editing an occasional config file.
Honestly never understood the hate for it. Who cares? Petty, stupid, nerd-wars over little crap like a text editor is the reason average people don't even consider linux.
Micro for the win
I used some distro with vim back in the day and I just kept using it. I lose my shit when I use something with just nano and my muscle memory tries to do a vim thing.
Linux text editor discourse has been baffling to me for decades now. I don't care which you use, and I care even less about why.
Some real talk.
Can we just include the 4 most popular text editors on basic systems??
Like i wanna scream when there isnt my text editor installed on a lightweight distro.
Vi Emacs Micro Nano
For context,
Debian ships with nano and vi Openwrt only ships with nano
Like cant we just include small editors. In a perfect world i would want neovim installed. But i understand its larger and has alot more dependency's.
So having VI isnt as good but im willing to be reasonable.
JUST INCLUDE VI
the reason i learned vim is because VI is installed by default on almost every distro.
Im tempted to try emacs tho
Emacs evil mode enters the chat
VS Code is probably the editor that's easiest to exit. If I ran it on the computer I first ran Emacs on, it'd exit immediately, because VS Code requires a modern version of Windows and that computer had Windows 3.11. If I ran it on the first computer I ran Linux on, it'd also exit immediately because the machine would run out of memory. (...it was a 486DX, I don't remember how much memory it had, but VS Code doesn't run well if your memory is measured in megabytes)
I use Nano with the CUA keybindings because screw it, modal editors are too slow for me
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