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 a part of the title.

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.

> 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.)

[0] https://man.netbsd.org/atto.1

From the announcement

> To ease the transition for new users...

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

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'll probably be an atto convert.

Also available for most linux distros as a package.

mg is nice, but I miss the colored text

[AT&T, actually.](https://man.cat-v.org/unix-1st/1/ed)

The dev calls it "Atto Emacs"

https://github.com/hughbarney/atto

And before you was: https://github.com/makuke1234/atto, which notes its name originating from A Truly Tiny text editOr.

Also used by Moodle, the open source LMS: https://docs.moodle.org/400/en/Atto_editor

[flagged]

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.

Currently seeing an influx of interest from new people who want an OS with strong anti-ai stances.

Beginners to NetBSD who are not vi users.

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.

Size:

Linux:

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

Because the BSD's are reflexively anti GNU.

Right. Vim is an Emacs in this sense, but mg, atto, joe, readline, etc., aren't.

Yeah, ae is awesome and inspirational, but it's missing some crucial features. It sounds like maybe he did eventually add a single level of undo, though?

Atto seems to be a little smaller than that version of ae, though.

ait version 1.16 will be out soon.

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.

I think they'd have your head on a plate if you suggested a vibe coded text editor.

There is nothing intuitive about any text editor.

I think single user has nvi as well.

Edit: apparently it requires /usr to be mounted though

Moodle's is a PHP-written web editor. Submitted is a C-written terminal editor.

Good point. An undersold feature of the old MS DOS editor (which was pretty nice) was that its command was ...edit.

(And VSCode also took some really good command line name real estate)

It is important for beginner-friendliness that it be possible to ask for help.

"Hey, how do I insert one file into another in text editor?"

"Which text editor?"

"Text editor."

"Sounds like a personal problem."

Nope! It has fully working UTF-8 support.

Anecdote only.

A lot of people in my circles recently got fed up with Windows breaking everything. They went from teasing about Linux, to installing it.

... And then the kernel fully embraced genAI.

The same people went, "No thanks." Saw NetBSD's AI stance, and started installing it.

Granted, tech people. But not that deep into things. Most are scared of the command line - but find they don't need it.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

It's using keystrokes inspired by emacs. Ok.

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

> I do not care that 40 years ago someone used Ctrl + C to send SIGINT, it is 2026 now.

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!!!"

You might enjoy the new Microsoft Edit [1].

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

I think you're underestimating just how "standard" many of the shortcuts are when mapped against a standard shell.

These are about as standard as you can get when it comes to Unix keybindings

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.

How is Ctrl+S "more traditional" than C-x C-s? C-x C-s is like 50 years old by now. Surely that qualifies as "traditional".

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.

Because this isn't beginner friendly it's a new micro Emacs and those are standard libreadline/emacs bindings.