NetBSD adds a new beginner-friendly text editor called atto

https://mastodon.sdf.org/@netbsd/117518160563539748

30•luke8086•1h ago

Comments

itomato•49m ago

NetBSD has beginners?

graemep•43m ago

Beginners to NetBSD who are not vi users.

alnsn•24m ago

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.

officeplant•12m ago

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

Levitating•46m ago

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

IshKebab•44m ago

> 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•25m ago

It's using keystrokes inspired by emacs. Ok.

passthejoe•23m ago

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

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

lukaslalinsky•3m ago

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

hnlmorg•19m ago

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.

Rucadi•44m ago

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•25m ago

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.

OnlineTux•40m ago

Why not just add nano?

Matl•34m ago

Because the BSD's are reflexively anti GNU.

ninjin•31m ago

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•26m ago

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•22m ago

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•25m ago

>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•3m ago

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

You are welcome!

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NetBSD adds a new beginner-friendly text editor called atto

Comments

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