this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2023
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First time when you ssh into your Linux terminal and you gotta “sudo crontab -e” or something and it’s like “what editor do you want to use?” and nano sounds lame so you choose vim cause the sound is cool when you say it and then you have to wipe the whole comp and start over

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I am a professional linux sysadmin, and I don't use Vim. There is honestly no task you will ever do that will actually require familiarity with Vim. You can get by with Nano just fine.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I use nano on my servers because the default configuration can be used by pretty much anyone, even if I had to explain it to someone over the phone. And hopefully you rarely if ever have to make sophisticated changes to files on servers that would benefit from vim's model.

If you do need to do consistent heavy-duty file editing on a server, rmate is really nice for that: https://github.com/aurora/rmate

But honestly both of these strategies are dated and I don't use either of them professionally. These days it's all immutable infrastructure: I use my local editor to make build scripts for immutable server images that there's no point in editing files on running instances because none of the changes will be persisted.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Exactly. The days of doing long form editing directly on your server are gone. Most likely any editing I'm doing is happening in VSCode or Notepad++/qq.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

vim feels nicer though :/