I am going to share a bit about a rabbit hole I went down recently.
I was curious what the deal was with GNU nano. Why is it always there? Why does it feel so weird? Who could possibly care about it given its bindings don’t feel native on GNU like #Emacs nor does it rely on the ubiquity (and supposed compositional grammar) of vi?
So here is the thing, there was once an email client called Pine. (Kids, ask your parents.) And Pine had a beloved email composition system called Pico (Pine composer), which was also available as its own editor. And its philosophy was geared for beginners. Think more like Notepad or TextEdit as opposed to something made for programming and the like.
In a twist of fate, Pico is actually an adaptation of MicroEMACS. So while it has some Emacs in its DNA, its user surface is quite different (again, aimed at beginners). And because the licensing of Pico restricted redistribution of modified binaries, it was first rewritten as TIP (“TIP Isn’t Pico”) which was later renamed to nano before it became a part of the GNU project.
And because it’s considered to be an editor for beginners, it is the standard default in many places.
As an addendum, and through this lens, GNU Emacs is at least two things: It’s the user-facing surface of the default keybindings (C-a, C-e and so on, the surface of GNU) and it’s the underlying extensible Lisp system. While many of you took to Emacs for that extensibility, I adopted it as a teen for the surface. And for 20+ years I used it just as you might use another variant of MicroEMACS, called mg (originally MicroGNUEmacs). To this day, to me, Emacs is the surface, the one set of keybinds that forms the GNU command surface across the shell and Emacs and Readline apps.
It’s not just a set of keybinds. It’s how I learnt to use a computer.
