I agree... but there are valid reasons for leaving things as they are, valid reasons for using Nano in the beginner's lessons, and valid reasons for introducing MC. I'm not sure which direction to fly in.

Hi,

You will find 'vi' on most GNU/Linux installations. So it would seem the universal choice.

For those that don't know how to use vi (or vim), just run 'vimtutor' for a nice tutorial that covers the basics.

I rather like emacs. It seems to be on most distros as well.
It has also been the subject of many flame wars.

Well, here we reach a point at which instruction cannot go beyond the scope of the teacher. I don't know a blasted thing about Emacs except that I tried it a long time ago and didn't care for it. I encourage people to check it out... maybe it's ideal for them. But I can't put in the time it would take to learn Emacs just so I can write a tutorial about it. I have a tutorial on using vim:

http://genek.net/LinuxAdventures/sysadmin/bash2.html

If someone wants to contribute a tutorial on Emacs I would be more than happy to include it. For the same reason I would be delighted if someone wanted to contribute tutorials for configuring the Xfce and Gnome desktops.

I feel as if the point is being missed. I use and recommend vim, and will continue to use it extensively as I move into the tutorials on system administration. But in the beginning tutorials (in which I am assuming that the reader has absolutely zero Linux experience) I feel as if I might be putting the cart before the horse. Here's the quandary: I cannot reasonably expect a Linux noob to sit through an entire lesson on using vim when they haven't even seen their desktop environments yet. It wasn't so very long ago (late '06) that I was installing Linux for the first time, and if somebody had told me I had to learn to use a fairly complex text editor before I could watch Flash videos on YouTube I'd have been outta there! Speaking as a very experienced teacher, the proposition is a loser.

So what I've done is tried to introduce exactly enough of vim for them to accomplish the tasks they need to make a Slackware installation a viable desktop computer platform. It doesn't feel right to me on a number of levels, and I'm wondering if it would be better to start off with a simpler tool and introduce vim properly a little further down the road. I'm about 80% convinced that this is what needs to be done, and I'm vacillating between Midnight Commander (which would give them access to a pretty damn cool terminal-based file manager in the bargain) and Nano. I'm hoping for a little input as to what I should do.

Nice site and tutorial! :)
Good read for new user along with the Slackbook.
What comes to editor, I haven't used MC personally but for nano, that's what my teacher told me to use when I came to Linux world and it was really easy. One could use it without reading anything if they just knew how to launch it. :)

Emacs is not hard at all for simple editing. Just launch:

The cursor keys will get you around, while using the delete key will delete text. Put the cursor where you want it and add and subtract text with the normal keys for doing so. While emacs has a lot of advanced uses, simple editing is easily accomplished. Launch it as root for system config files. In a GUI, there is a toolbar across the top. For the cli, the only key combo one needs for simple editing is Ctrl+x,c,y - that will save and close the file.

I have no idea how powerful emacs is, but there is a wealth of info out there.

I just fired up nano for the first time, and it seems to be very easy also for simple editing. Hard to go wrong with either.

My advice is to make your tutorials editor-agnostic and just explain what they are to be changing. Recommend nano to start (because it lists all of the keystrokes at the bottom of the window and uses standard, expected keys with no mode switching) but provide links to vim and emacs tutorials (and any other editor you want). After knowing the basic vi commands when I started out with Slackware (which were mentioned in a tutorial), vi was still an immensely frustrating experience for me. Now I love vim and use it every day, but pico/nano would be the ideal editors to recommend for initial text editing (just to get the system up and running). Then, should the user wish to pursue more capable editing tools, they can go find a tutorial on vim/emacs/joe/whatever else.

1 members found this post helpful.

I agree with T3slider. Although my editor of choice is Emacs, Nano is definitely the easiest and most suitable for beginners.

This is the direction I'm leaning in.

I guess cause I am old and knew xTree [ pre gold version ] from DOS days; that I am partial to mc [ midnight commander ]. As I prefer to install A packages only and get thru the reboot process; I have always been ????? [ pick your own word ] that mc is in AP and not A. Should the reboot fail, restart the install iso, mount /mnt your partitions, chroot /mnt, edit lilo.conf using mc, issue lilo then reboot has been my sweet spot. I suspect those not legal to consume adult beverages would find this archaic.

I did eventually decide to modify the Basic Slackware Configuration and Basic Slackware Package Management tutorials to use Nano instead of vim. All tutorials beyond that still use vim, but I'm considering making them text editor neutral. I'll keep my basic vim primer up (along with my very strong recommendation to get comfortable with it; it's the one editor that you can guarantee will be on any *nix you ever encounter), but all lessons beyond the very basic ones will assume you know what text editor you want to use. This, I think, is in keeping with the Slackware philosophy of putting the user in the driver's seat, but obviously I can't do it in the beginner's tutorials... remember that I wrote those with the assumption that the reader has never, ever even seen a Linux installation before.

I'll probably do a tutorial on using Midnight Commander in the near future. Right now I'm writing one on the workings of the shell (initialization, variables, basic scripting, etc) that is taking me a lot more time than I thought it would. In my estimation a tutorial on setting up printers and another on file permissions are needed in fairly short order as well. If anyone can think of any other gaps that need filled please let me know.

I'm replacing the weekly news with a blog, which the news link at the top of the homepage will lead to.

http://genek.net/wordpress/

I did a blog post detailing a few of the tweaks I did when I reverted my -current desktop to 13.1. Don't know if anyone might find it interesting or useful, but here it is anyway:

http://genek.net/wordpress/?p=20

I took a bit of a break from writing tutorials, but I've got a couple in the works that should be finished soon.

I think you did the right thing regarding nano over vim for new people. People will probably be feeling uncomfortable enough staring at run level 3 without having to wrap their heads around a modal editor (Disclaimer: I'm a big vim fan, I wrote my undergraduate honours thesis in vim).

By all means they should be told somewhere later on that nano is a simplified editor and *nix has a handful of super-powered text editors they can learn.