Why are they using weird key combinations instead of traditional Ctrl + S, Ctrl + A, Ctrl + C used in desktop applications? Why every console program wants to be a special snowflake and not use standard key combinations, please explain. I do not care that 40 years ago someone used Ctrl + C to send SIGINT, it is 2026 now.

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.

The source code and README are here: https://github.com/NetBSD/src/tree/trunk/usr.bin/atto

You are welcome!

NetBSD isn't the first to use the name. My pet text editor is also called atto: https://git.levitati.ng/Levitating/atto

NetBSD has beginners?

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.

Careful, they might ban you!

Why not just add nano?

Because the BSD's are reflexively anti GNU.

nano(1) is GPLv3 last time I checked and that imposes more restrictions than most (all?) of the rest of the code in NetBSD. It is not about being "reflexive", it is a violation of the very ethos of the project. Gnu rejecting non-free licenses from their own distributions is not "reflexive", it is simply not in line with what they want to achieve and one should respect that.

Unless they modify it, the GPL really doesn't impact them. AFAIK FSF considers most BSD/MIT style licences to be compatible. It's the other way around where things gets stuck. Unless they need Linux GPU/WIFI/BT drivers to make things work, of course. Then it's fine.

Modification is the whole point of open source: "Unless you want to modify Windows, the closeness does not impact you". If you want to learn about how NetBSD looks at things, there is this page:

https://netbsd.org/about/redistribution.html

As for being compatible. Yes, FSF considers anything permissive to be compatible with their family of licenses. However, it is a one-way relationship in that permissive code can be freely used by GPL projects, but not the other way around as using GPL code would impose further restrictions compared to a permissive license.

Size:

Linux:

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

per the link, atto(1) is 48 kilobytes.

For me the most easy-to-use editor for cli / ssh and relatively lightweight is https://github.com/sinelaw/fresh everybody can just use it intuitively.

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

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.

> Perhaps all that needs to be known to use atto at a basic level is that holding the control key, pressing x, then pressing w will write the currently open file, and holding the control key, pressing x, then pressing c will exit the editor.

Very beginner friendly lol. These people have no idea.

Micro is a beginner-friendly console text editor. This isn't.

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

But written in Go, and I would expect the NetBSD base only includes software buildable using tools already in the base system.

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.

As we all know, beginners love Emacs keystrokes.

>making it suitable for inclusion in the rescue system

People seem to be missing the point. Also NetBSD has what I call a "read single user mode". Last time I had to boot single user, ed(1) was the only editor available without some work. My guess is this new editor will be useful for people who do not want to deal with ed(1).

I have not seen it yet, but I guess it will be includes in 11.1.