this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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I once had a junior calling me in a panic because he didn't know how to quit nano. NANO!
Nano... Like... The one that has all the keybinds permanently shown at the bottom of the screen?
Burnt into the old LCD screen.
And your retinas.
Yeah, that one...
Onscreen instructions unclear, pressed Shift+6+X. Still stuck in Nano.
That deserves a "do you know how to read?", because the exit command is on the lower part of the screen for nano
To be fair, they show up as “^X” or whatever, and typing [Shift]+[6] followed by the [X]-key doesn't do the trick.
Huh? Isn't it like right there at the bottom of the screen?
I guess not knowing that ^X means Control+X could be the issue, but still...
TIL!
Can exit nano on my own, have the common sense to not call in a panic about it before at least looking it up. (Which is how I learned how to exit it: looking it up.) But was never taught about ^ meaning "Control+" until your comment, especially since nowadays people write it out as "Control+" or "CTRL+".
I might have put two and two together when dealing with everything else in nano after I learned to exit, but never really internalized the rule "^ means Control+". So thank you for your comment!
Disclaimer: I feel like I am too stupid for most of programming.dev but participate here anyways because I learn stuff from the comments.
Don't feel stupid. It's bad enough that all of IT is one giant impostor-syndrome support group. There's literally too much for any one person to know, and it's been that way for a very long time. Just give it your all, and memorize how to reliably search and look things up; take notes for the really important stuff. The rest will filter into your memory with practice.
Also: anyone that holds this kind of thing over your head is attempting to distract from how much they don't know. Most people in this industry understand and don't judge.
As for the
^thing, I recall seeing that as far back as the 1990's. I want to say Microsoft actually popularized it, but it could easily be OS2 (IBM) or Apple. In hindsight, it's kind of wild to have a TUI (terminal user interface) hold your hand like this. Nano (and Pico) are kind of in a special category like that.Nano nano!
drinks water with finger
Ork humor. Love it.
Do you remember the "press any key to exit"? Someone asked where is the "any" key.
I mean, maybe it was just me but I had to search what the hell ^ meant in nano, but after that it was alright.
I had an intermediate not understand how to read a pipe-delimited text file.
Read as in, with their eyes? Or how to ingest it into some other app/script? Cos I'm vaguely aware that awk can be used in some way for this, but wouldn't have a clue how.
awk is practically made for record processing, within the shell you can set
$IFS. The reason so many ancient UNIX file formats use:as separator is because that's the default setting of$IFS.It's all a huge PITA, though. I mean there's a reason why people started using perl instead. Nushell is great for that kind of stuff, even more so if you have random json or such lying around it loads just as easily. "Everything is a string" was a mistake.
The former.