Yet another Hacker News

NetBSD adds a new beginner-friendly text editor called atto

38 points luke8086 1 hour ago 29 comments

itomato 1 hour ago | parent

NetBSD has beginners?

graemep 56 minutes ago | parent

Beginners to NetBSD who are not vi users.

alnsn 37 minutes ago | parent

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.

daishi55 10 minutes ago | parent

Careful, they might ban you!

officeplant 24 minutes ago | parent

Currently seeing an influx of interest from new people who want an OS with strong anti-ai stances.

Levitating 59 minutes ago | parent

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

IshKebab 57 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

CodeCompost 38 minutes ago | parent

It's using keystrokes inspired by emacs. Ok.

passthejoe 36 minutes ago | parent

Micro is MIT licensed, so it should be shippable in NetBSD base.

https://github.com/micro-editor/MICRO

lukaslalinsky 16 minutes ago | parent

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

hnlmorg 32 minutes ago | parent

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.

yearolinuxdsktp 7 minutes ago | parent

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.

Rucadi 57 minutes ago | parent

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.

hnlmorg 38 minutes ago | parent

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.

Daunk 4 minutes ago | parent

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

OnlineTux 53 minutes ago | parent

Why not just add nano?

Matl 47 minutes ago | parent

Because the BSD's are reflexively anti GNU.

ninjin 44 minutes ago | parent

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.

Matl 39 minutes ago | parent

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.

ninjin 35 minutes ago | parent

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.

jmclnx 35 minutes ago | parent

Size:

Linux:

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

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

jmclnx 38 minutes ago | parent

>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.

markusQi 16 minutes ago | parent

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

You are welcome!

codedokode 9 minutes ago | parent

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.