Hacker News

NetBSD adds a new beginner-friendly text editor called atto

65 points by luke8086 3 hours ago | 49 comments

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.

luke8086 5 seconds ago

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 part of the title.

insanetake 25 minutes ago

From the announcement

> To ease the transition for new users...

So I would consider it for beginners ("new users") and friendly ("to ease").

drummojg 36 minutes ago

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.

Natfan 29 minutes ago

what's really the point in being the smartest person in the room? you'll never learn anything!

MonkeyClub 7 minutes ago

Yep, whenever you find yourself being the smartest person in the room, you need to find yourself a smarter room.

vinceguidry 24 seconds ago

Or just learn how to teach.

metchio 8 minutes ago

sometimes humans do irrational things / have illogical behaviour just to glorify their own ego. it happens also to the very best sometimes

Gracana 3 minutes ago

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.

codedokode 47 minutes ago

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.

elehack 30 minutes ago

Atto's default key bindings match Emacs, which is about as standard as you get for non-modal editing keys in older Unix traditions.

cowlevel 16 minutes ago

and isn't at all beginner friendly

codedokode 9 minutes ago

Emacs is probably older than me why should we care about what they used in 80s?

MonkeyClub 6 minutes ago

I see you’re using Latin characters...

currysausage 39 minutes ago

You might enjoy the new Microsoft Edit [1].

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/edit

rustyhancock 27 minutes ago

Because this isn't beginner friendly it's a new micro Emacs and those are standard libreadline/emacs bindings.

boricj 42 minutes ago

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.

insanetake 27 minutes ago

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.

Levitating 2 hours ago

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

cowlevel 16 minutes ago

To be beginner friendly they should call it text editor. Or notepad, or quickwriter. I don't get the open source naming conventions.

markusQi 55 minutes ago

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

You are welcome!

itomato 2 hours ago

NetBSD has beginners?

officeplant 2 hours ago

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

graemep 2 hours ago

Beginners to NetBSD who are not vi users.

excannuk 2 hours ago

[dead]

alnsn 2 hours 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.

daishi55 49 minutes ago

Careful, they might ban you!

OnlineTux 2 hours ago

Why not just add nano?

Matl 2 hours ago

Because the BSD's are reflexively anti GNU.

ninjin 2 hours 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 2 hours 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.

brewmarche 33 minutes ago

> 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.

ninjin 2 hours 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 2 hours ago

Size:

Linux:

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

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

Rucadi 2 hours 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 2 hours 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.

Daunk 43 minutes ago

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

stonogo 11 minutes ago

There is nothing intuitive about any text editor.

jmclnx 2 hours ago

>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.

iamnothere 15 minutes ago

I think single user has nvi as well.

Edit: apparently it requires /usr to be mounted though

IshKebab 2 hours 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.

hnlmorg 2 hours 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.

chipotle_coyote 41 minutes ago

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.

passthejoe 2 hours ago

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

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

lukaslalinsky 55 minutes ago

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

iamnothere 13 minutes ago

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

passthejoe 38 minutes ago

Good point

yearolinuxdsktp 46 minutes ago

Project headline is “The smallest functional Emacs in less than 2000 lines of C.”