Re: Fw: nano key bindings

[Chris Allegretta]

------- Original Message -------
On Thursday, January 12th, 2023 at 10:49 AM, Benno <benno@telfort.nl> wrote:
> 
> Hi Chris,
> 
> Op 12-01-2023 om 16:06 schreef Chris Allegretta:
> What sane person still uses Twitter these days? :)

It seems not many. In the 6 hours since I posted the poll we've had 4 
responses: 2 for ^F, one for ^/ and one for change nothing. Not very scientific 
of course. I'll report again when the poll finishes on Sat, but of course I put 
more stock in the feedback we get on the mailing lists.

> Okay. But what do you think about simply telling the user to help
> themselves and make use of the powers of the ~/.nanorc file?

This goes a bit into what folks like Victor have brought up: that the default 
key that we advertise for search is, for more and more users nowadays, 
unfortunately  destructive to their editing session. I have been fortunate to 
usually get a <file>.save when it happens to me, but not always: perhaps some 
weird race condition exists with nano receiving a SIGTERM only some of the time 
before the session dies.

To me, nano's intended audience was always the 1st year University student 
sitting down at the terminal in their CS101 class, who is actually looking at 
and being grateful for the 'bottombars', with the help description for the 
mainly used keys plainly written and accessible. I believe more and more 
nowadays those folks will likely be using some web terminal like noVNC to 
access their system, where usually ^w will indeed be fatal to their entire 
remote connection and state, not just their editing session. It feels like 
those are the folks we should be doing the least harm to, in terms of vanilla 
'out of the box' setup.

If, as some folks have mentioned, some nano users have managed to rig up a 
pre-VT100 era keyboard and monitor with no arrow keys, they strike me as the 
people savvy enough to set ^F back to 'move forward' via config files. Though 
honestly the idea of using anything other than vi in such a setup (where one 
would quickly switch modes and be able to navigate around quickly with single 
keystrokes, i.e. hjkl) seems a bit crazy, but to each their own!

I will change my vote to ^F based on what folks like Victor have brought up.

I also desperately need to get away from protonmail's web ui and back to mutt 
for my personal email.