Nano is not as ubiquitous as vi. Every single *nix box will have vi on it, so even if you prefer something else, it's still in your best interest to learn the basics of vi.
>Nano does many things quicker and easier than vi. For example, search & replace.
There may be instances where Nano does something quicker but search and replace would seem to be a perfect example of the opposite where Nano has taken a quick one line thing in vi and turned it into a multistep process for simplicity.
I think the point may have been that nano is a safe assumption to be on most any GNU/Linux machine where as gedit might not be and that nano has all of the commands listed on the screen for quick reference.
For example when I was taking my sysadmin class we used CENTOS which did not have gedit since it did not have a GUI. We used VI instead, but I learned nano was good for simple fixes and I did not have to google the method of saving and exiting.
I'm going to be perfectly honest, I got trapped like this in vi, decided that anything so complicated to exit out of wasn't for me and stuck with nano ever since.
In a way, maybe it's good it's not programmable. This ensures that on any machine or environment you see Nano, you can expect it to behave exactly the same. If you want something super customizable you can just use vi(m) or emacs.
Nano is like Windows Notepad but for the CLI. It does one thing one thing only, no matter where you are.
For my sins, I've worked on an old HP-UX system back in the Before-Times and that once required knowledge of vi to get it booting - no nano on that system.
For more modern systems, you can end up in BusyBox and not have access to nano (I think you can specify that vi gets included in BusyBox).
I'm not actually a Comp Sci major or anything, maybe that matters?
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