Ironically, the best text editor for *nix may be Microsoft Edit.
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Badly editorialized title.
The beginner-friendly label seems to be obscuring what atto actually is, which is a very small Emacs-like editor meant to live in the base system. At roughly 48 KB and under 2,000 lines of C, it fits places nano and the larger alternatives do not, especially a rescue environment or single-user mode where you still need something more usable than ed or a stripped-down vi. That constraint also explains the choices people are arguing about here: Emacs bindings come with the design, and a permissively licensed C program can be maintained with the tools NetBSD already ships, unlike a Go editor such as micro. For someone new to NetBSD but already comfortable at a Unix terminal, that is a reasonable trade. It is less a first editor for a general beginner than a safety net that happens to be approachable once you are already in that world.
I appreciate this in the man page:
> atto is not the standard editor
stings to see emacs keybinding hardcoded
unless someone can offer a custom keybinding mechanism.. and custom dynamic functions the user can bind to..
How do you exit atto? Gotta make it hard:)
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NetBSD isn't the first to use the name. My pet text editor is also called atto: https://git.levitati.ng/Levitating/atto
Also used by Moodle, the open source LMS: https://docs.moodle.org/400/en/Atto_editor
And before you was: https://github.com/makuke1234/atto, which notes its name originating from A Truly Tiny text editOr.
Genuine question: Are there a lot of "beginners" hopping on NetBSD?
I feel like most people who even know about NetBSD would be technical enough to at least function at a basic level in something like vi or nano.
Anecdote only.
A lot of people in my circles recently got fed up with Windows breaking everything. They went from teasing about Linux, to installing it.
... And then the kernel fully embraced genAI.
The same people went, "No thanks." Saw NetBSD's AI stance, and started installing it.
Granted, tech people. But not that deep into things. Most are scared of the command line - but find they don't need it.
I always thought the essential feature of an emacs was its extensibility. I never felt that emacs was just a collection of keybinds and split buffer windows.
Note, I'm not talking about Lisp per se, just some kind of mechanic within the editor to allow the user to make extensions to it.
Right. Vim is an Emacs in this sense, but mg, atto, joe, readline, etc., aren't.
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.
There is nothing intuitive about any 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.
I think they'd have your head on a plate if you suggested a vibe coded text editor.
To be beginner friendly they should call it text editor. Or notepad, or quickwriter. No beginner is going to guess that something called Atto lets you write words on a computer.
It is important for beginner-friendliness that it be possible to ask for help.
"Hey, how do I insert one file into another in text editor?"
"Which text editor?"
"Text editor."
"Sounds like a personal problem."
Is this the same editor that is used in the open-source Moodle LMS?
https://docs.moodle.org/400/en/Atto_editor https://github.com/moodlehq/moodle-editor_atto
Moodle's is a PHP-written web editor. Submitted is a C-written terminal editor.
https://www.netbsd.org/~ktnb/ait.html
(If don't want to link curses and terminfo)
For me ait is a 277.3K static binary (musl)
Here's an earlier "Anthony's Editor" by Anthony Howe of MK Systems for IOCC 1991
https://www.ioccc.org/1991/ant/index.html
Here is a message about writing editors he sent to comp.editors in 1991
https://web.archive.org/web/20031214211718if_/http://ned.rub...
https://web.archive.org/web/20040221091356if_/http://ned.rub...
The later Anthony's Editor upon which atto is based, from 1993:
https://web.archive.org/web/20101130024855if_/http://sites.g...
The atto author got it to compile on GNU/Linux:
https://github.com/hughbarney/Anthonys-Editor--for-Ubuntu-Li...
According to the above Usenet communication, Howe was not a CS major
Perhaps this explains why his IOCC entries are so good IMHO
His 6086-character grep-like utility, "ag", from 1993 is all-time favorite
It still compiles today: 30.6K static binary (musl)
Yeah, ae is awesome and inspirational, but it's missing some crucial features. It sounds like maybe he did eventually add a single level of undo, though?
Atto seems to be a little smaller than that version of ae, though.
ait version 1.16 will be out soon.
The source code and README are here: https://github.com/NetBSD/src/tree/trunk/usr.bin/atto
You are welcome!
The dev calls it "Atto Emacs"
> https://man.netbsd.org/atto.1
> atto is not the standard editor.
Hah. That is clearly a reference to https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html
[AT&T, actually.](https://man.cat-v.org/unix-1st/1/ed)
Who knew a little emacs-like editor would be so controversial.
I think it looks great. Syntax highlighting, multi-buffer, splits, standard emacs commands... For new users in the emacs camp, this seems like a nice editor to include in the base install. Even as a vi user, I'd be pretty happy being stuck with this in a rescue system.
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>making it suitable for inclusion in the rescue system
People seem to be missing the point. Also NetBSD has what I call a "real 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 included in 11.1.
I think single user has nvi as well.
Edit: apparently it requires /usr to be mounted though
You are looking at the wrong one. Look at /rescue/vi .
> 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.
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.
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.
Probably because the post starts "To ease the transition for new users..."?
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.
The post says "To ease the transition for new users".
It's using keystrokes inspired by emacs. Ok.
As we all know, beginners love Emacs keystrokes.
Micro is MIT licensed, so it should be shippable in NetBSD base.
But written in Go, and I would expect the NetBSD base only includes software buildable using tools already in the base system.
Good point
11 MB is also a lot bigger than 48k
I do think Micro is a nice editor, but we need a tiny, BSD licensed pico/nano for true beginners
I didn't realize the size difference was so huge.
Atto has a great man page that would give a user everything they needed to know if they were unfamiliar with emacs keybindings.
OpenBSD also has an Emacs-y non-extensible editor, mg(1):
Just noting for completeness, as I didn’t catch any mention of it.
Also available for most linux distros as a package.
mg is nice, but I miss the colored text
I've used mg and find it generally useful. It's my default editor pretty much everywhere.
However, the code is a mess, with deliberately cryptic identifiers (e.g., `w_doto` for `cursorOffset`), redundant functions (e.g., `vtputc()` is a strict subset of the behavior of `vtpute()`) and a bunch of other weird choices (e.g., deeply-baked assumptions that one byte == one char == one column, even thought Big5 and ShiftJIS were already a thing when it was written).
I tried adding UTF-8 support to mg a couple years ago and basically gave up.
I'll probably be an atto convert.
> `w_doto` for `cursorOffset`
Well, sometimes we call the cursor "the dot."
Literally never heard that prior to hacking on the mg codebase.
Emacs called it “point” which is not as far. The cursor is just the visible widget.
In GNU Emacs, try running M-: (dot) RET.
I think this alias was an aid to porting Lisp from some other Emacs variant in the 80s that used "dot" instead of "point". Never figured out which. It isn't mg because mg doesn't run Lisp.
also in sam and acme editors in plan9 os
NetBSD has beginners?
NetBSD is IMHO the most beginner friendly nix out there. It's small, lean, and well documented. You could know almost nothing about nix, read their handbook, and come the other side half competent. Linux (my daily driver) by comparison is a constantly moving target with no single source for coherent documentation and where anything goes. FreeBSD is better, but when I last used the handbook it had plenty of outdated chapters, and it seemed like everything had so many different ways of doing things. NetBSD had small elegant solutions, and recompiling your entire system from scratch was a pleasant experience that didn't have me trapped in dependency hell or even needing to consult documentation after I got started.
> NetBSD is IMHO the most beginner friendly nix out there.
I'd argue that OpenBSD would be worthy of that title, too. It is incredibly easy, elegant, and simple. The thoughtfulness that goes into all the base system utilities in OpenBSD is so appreciated.
FreeBSD is kinda somewhere in between Open/NetBSD and Linux in my opinion. Their docs are OK, but the handbook leaves a lot to be desired, and they don't seem to have nearly nice little quality of life utilities that OpenBSD has out of the box.
You can ask Claude to cross-complie, prepare an image (aka install) and run an emulator. I tried exactly this yesterday and in about an hour I could attach to tmux and run tests on emulated riscv64 board.
Careful, they might ban you!
Beginners to NetBSD who are not vi users.
It's funny because I learned enough vi to be useful specifically because of NetBSD forcing you to change "rc_configured=NO" to "rc_configured=YES" in rc.conf.
That's not an empty set? I'm an eMacs guy, and I use vi when on the shell
I think there are a lot of people who are not comfortable with vi. Its much the same reason that some Linux distros default to nano.
I spend a fair bit of time on Linux command lines, but I use a mix of different TUI and GUI editors (including ones that work over ssh for editing files on servers), and none of those are vi. I can manage vi if I must, but its an effort and distracts from the task because I have to think about how to do things in vi.
Same here...
My favourite editor is mcedit, which you get by installing mc (midnight commander)
Like nano but (IMO) easier to use with a lot more features
Currently seeing an influx of interest from new people who want an OS with strong anti-ai stances.
And those who still use 32-bit machines, as Linux is in the process of killing support for them.
Oh no! What does that mean for using Wine to play games? From what I understand a lot of Windows games (especially older ones) require 32-bit Wine, which requires 32-bit libs (which I assume requires 32-bit Kernel support). It's the sole reason I run 64- and 32-bit multilib on my Arch box: playing Windows games.
Running 32-bit software isn't going away, just running a 32-bit kernel.
64 bit Linux can run 32 bit programs just like Windows. Modern Wine is using a WoW64 model where the 64 bit host code loads 32 bit DLLs when some app needs them.
I guess it has poor (or nonexistent) unicode support in 48kb. My only gripe with NetBSD was its lacking UTF-8 support for many core tools (eg. wscons, vi) when I used it as daily driver beck in the days (NetBSD 5 RC2 times :P)
Nope! It has fully working UTF-8 support.
Wow! Nice!
… and multi-byte character set support was added for nvi2 about a decade and a half ago.
but according to the docs not to the nvi version in the base system.
Why not just add nano?
Size:
Linux:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 321832 Dec 15 2021 /usr/bin/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.
> Unless they need Linux GPU/WIFI/BT drivers to make things work, of course. Then it's fine.
The parts of Linux that get integrated into BSDs should not be GPL-licensed, e.g. <https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/c339f4010dea8b0d754f8...> and its siblings use MIT.
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.
Because this isn't beginner friendly it's a new micro Emacs and those are standard libreadline/emacs bindings.
These are about as standard as you can get when it comes to Unix keybindings
How is Ctrl+S "more traditional" than C-x C-s? C-x C-s is like 50 years old by now. Surely that qualifies as "traditional".
You might enjoy the new Microsoft Edit [1].
> I do not care that 40 years ago someone used Ctrl + C to send SIGINT, it is 2026 now.
Not "40 years ago". Non-stop all day every day for 55 years.
The fact that you personally don't use it today is as irrelevant as if you were ranting about "why doesn't Linux have a Start menu!? It's 2026!!!"
These key combinations have been used for 50 years, so I'm not sure why you call them non-standard. They're just a different standard from what you're used to.
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.
msedit ftw
Honestly after VSCode ate a good chunk of vim and emacs users I am not sure why something with similar UX but in terminal is not the standard yet in every *nix. Talk about sunken cost fallacy.
Bazzite recently started to ship msedit by default, which makes sense since a large portion of its userbase are first time Linux users.
It did make for quite a surprise for existing users when the msedit logo popped up in their KDE Plasma launchers though.
I think you're underestimating just how "standard" many of the shortcuts are when mapped against a standard shell.
"Standard shell" also should allow Ctrl + C for copying, it makes no sense to use a different combination for console.
55 years of a standard, but then you come and say that the standard should be something else.
That's… not what "standard" means.
Okay, but now you have to modify the shell and configure a different shortcut for SIGINT without stepping on something else.
Is this problem a Nobel prize level problem?
Atto's default key bindings match Emacs, which is about as standard as you get for non-modal editing keys in older Unix traditions.
and isn't at all beginner friendly
> match Emacs
For many, it is indeed about what they call "muscle memory". Almost impossible to change after so many years. And therefore I hope everyone would provide keybinding alternatives generally (shouldn't be that hard).
Emacs is probably older than me why should we care about what they used in 80s?
I see you’re using Latin characters...
It's 2026, why would anyone want to use an Intel architecture?
Or ARM? It's from the 1980s! So old!
Depends, do you care about UNIX and C, as products from 1970's?
UNIX doesn't exist anymore, and C has lot of negative points (easy to create buffer overflows, integer overflows, use-after-free, and other vulnerabilities).
Then use Redox OS, or convince Torvalds to merge Asterinas' memory handling code into Linux.
It surely does, Linux distros, BSDs, Aix, z/UNIX are all alive and well.
Despite all those flaws, people keep writing new software in C every day, go figure.
I would assert Wordstar style are equally as old.
But are mostly forgotten while emacs keybindings are still popular and found in all kinds of places you wouldn't expect, like MacOS textboxes.
Not when using joe, for example.
jmacs.
jmacs is a rather recent mode.
To promote this to a top-level comment, because I think it's important context: 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 functional Emacs in less than 2000 lines of C."
I think somebody incorrectly described Atto as comparable to nano/pico, and these comments are dragging it because it's not something that it was never intended as.
> nothing in the README file says the point is to be "beginner-friendly"
"for users who are not accustomed to text editors with separate insertion and editing modes"[0] could be construed as "beginner-friendly" (albeit with some squinting, I'd concede.)
From the announcement
> To ease the transition for new users...
So I would consider it for beginners ("new users") and friendly ("to ease").
Well nano pico atto ... the name makes it comparable. Why would you expect people to not draw that connection?
I think the main take-away is that vi/vim is too complicated for many folks. I use nano a lot on the commandline. For quick editing it is so much more convenient than vim.
OP here, I just paraphrased the announcement:
> To ease the transition for new users, #NetBSD -current now includes an alternative editor to vi(1) and xedit(1) in its base system, atto(1). https://man.netbsd.org/atto.1
> It is a modeless screen-based editor similar to nano, pico, xedit, or emacs. It is only 48 kilobytes, making it suitable for inclusion in the rescue system.
I think it's fair to call it beginner-friendly, in context of BSD and vi, but maybe indeed it shouldn't be a part of the title.
Ok, we've removed beginner-friendliness from the title above. It's still interesting!
I can't imagine a beginner really knowing what is going on in nano.
Every time I get launched into nano/pico on a new system I find it very confusing. To use the help menu you need to know that ^-X means Ctrl-X and M-X means Alt-X. Why "Write Out" and not "Save"? And when I "Write Out" I'm offered DOS format or Mac format, and options to Append or Prepend (not even sure what that does).
It's completely bizarre if you're used to something like Notepad or Word.
I use nano the same way I use notepad. I open a file, edit it, hit close, and agree to save when it complains to me.
> I can't imagine a beginner really knowing what is going on in nano.
When you launch nano without a file loaded, there's a notice at the bottom of the screen: [ Welcome to nano. For basic help, type Ctrl+G. ]
Press 'Ctrl + G' and it takes you to a help page that says, among other things, "Shortcuts are written as follows: Control-key sequences are notated with a '^' and can be entered either by using the Ctrl key or pressing the Esc key twice. Meta-key sequences are notated with 'M-' and can be entered using either the Alt, Cmd, or Esc key, depending on your keyboard setup."
You can't force a user to read docs or learn how the programs they're using work, but this is a reasonable attempt.
>Why "Write Out" and not "Save"?
At least "Uncut" has been renamed to "Paste".
As someone who was a beginner once, I found nano leaps and bounds more intuitive than vim. You can quite easily stumble your way through nano with minimal exerimentation, and once you figured out that ^ stands for control you can just use the handy always-visible command reference at the bottom
Sure, GUI software is much more intuitive. But if you start with the constraint of being a TUI editor with no mouse support, nano does extremely well
First time I opened vi I had to power cycle the computer to get out of it. If nano/pico is not user friendly, vi is user user antagonistic.
Oh I absolutely agree, none of vi, emacs, nano/pico make any sense to a beginner. vi probably the worst because of the modes. But I my point was just that I don't think nano is particulary beginner-friendly. Maybe the least worst though.
Just FYI, they did try to improve that a bit. Release notes for nano v8.0:
> Command-line option --modernbindings (-/) makes ^Q quit, ^X cut, ^C copy, ^V paste, ^Z undo, ^Y redo, ^O open a file, ^W write a file, ^R replace, ^G find again, ^D find again backwards, ^A set the mark, ^T jump to a line, ^P show the position, and ^E execute.
> Above modern bindings are activated also when the name of nano's executable (or a symlink to it) starts with the letter "e".
So if you symlink nano to /usr/bin/editor and make it the default $EDITOR, then you now do get CUA-like bindings by default.
There’s still a lot of more things they perhaps should enable by default. I don’t know whether you’ve looked into .nanorc, but you can turn on stuff like syntax highlighting and line numbers, it’s just all off by default.
I don’t actually use nano myself, but I was really taken aback by how featureful it is when you look closely. Not st the level of Vim or Emacs, but more than expected. I basically stumbled upon someone on Reddit /r/unixporn that "riced" their nanorc and it piqued my curiosity.
For most people though, I think micro is a better fit than nano if you want a terminal CUA-style editor.
> Above modern bindings are activated also when the name of nano's executable (or a symlink to it) starts with the letter "e".
Maybe stupid question but do you then need to run nano through the symlink to get the new bindings or is the existence of a symlink enough? Wouldn’t nano have to check every directory for a symlink to itself to do that? There’s no way to get all symlinks for a specific file without checking the whole file system, right?
I believe you have to run it through the symlink, and that it just checks argv[0] to decide. It’s the same Vim does, FWIW: if you run it via a symlink called `vi` it enters a vi-compatible mode, and if you run it as `evim` it suddenly acts as a non-modal text editor, and as `vimdiff` it enters the diff mode.
That's because no one knows their history anymore.
Nano was a (bloated as usual) GNU clone of Pico. Its only reason for existing is GPL freedumb nonsense that was popular back in the day. It copied the UX of Pico.
Pico was not developed as a standalone editor; rather it was the builtin editor for the Pine email reader. Hence the weird keybindings — it followed the UX of the email client.
Pico stood for PIne COmposer.
It became a simple universal editor because vi and emacs sucked and for some reason no one felt it necessary to invent something better.
Users repurposed the editor from a mail client because it was already there. Nearly every university Sun box in the 90s had Pine installed for reading email.
It was written by the same guy that invented IMAP at the University of Washington.
Can't wait for the Rust clone of Nano then the cycle will be complete.
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Joe editor dates back to 1991 and it came with jpico, jmacs and jstar as pico, emacs and wordstar clones as a hard link.
Nobody learns to use an editor - or for that matter, learns anything - by figuring out a history lecture first.
People that do that are weirdos, and yes, I'm one. But I don't expect regular people to learn that way.
> Its only reason for existing is GPL freedumb nonsense that was popular back in the day.
These days we need more GPL, not less. We need AGPL and apparently, soon, AntiLLM-GPL.
I should clarify.
The reason Pico became popular — if you went to university in the 90s — is normal people, not just turbonerds, needed the occasional ability to edit simple text files on Unix hosts.
They were already using Pine to read their email, so why not use the editor that used the same keybindings they already knew for sending mail?
I would never drag pico. I wrote software that's been packaged in Linux distros in pico. And I lost the urge to be The Smartest Guy In The [Room/Mailing List/Forum] a long, long time ago.
I used pico or nano as my everyday unix coding editor for something like fifteen years, starting in the late '90s. It was just fine. I couldn't stand vi and didn't see the point of emacs; I type faster than I think, so I never found that text-editing was enough of a bottleneck to make sophisticated automation worth the effort.
I only stopped using pico/nano after writing my own editor, which blatantly stole pico's interface design.
what's really the point in being the smartest person in the room? you'll never learn anything!
sometimes humans do irrational things / have illogical behaviour just to glorify their own ego. it happens also to the very best sometimes
Not only that, but you constantly feel like Idiocracy is playing out in real time, and that everyone else around you is closer to monkeys than a rational empathetic human... it's exhausting, lonely and debilitating. Then you realize there are people much smarter than you, and you wonder how they must feel.
Reminds me of that House MD episode where the delivery driver was a secret genius who was abusing DXM to dumb himself down just to feel happy.
"For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief."
Yep, whenever you find yourself being the smartest person in the room, you need to find yourself a smarter room.
Or just learn how to teach.
> Or just learn how to teach.
Most people don't want to learn (in particular not learn sufficiently hard to really improve).
True, many a junior dev I've had to work with was convinced they're the smartest person in the room, good at what they do but so full of themselves they're unable to adapt, acquire new knowledge or consider new paradigms.
Learning requires some amount of humbleness, to accept you don't know everything.
Motivating students to want to learn isn't rocket science, just a rare skill to see.
If it is not rocket science, how does it work?