Engineering Craft › Developer Tooling

Terminal Text Editors (Vim, Nano)

Editing files on a server where there's no IDE, and how to quit Vim.

Also known as: Vim, Nano, Emacs, vi

Sometimes you must edit a file where there’s no graphical editor: on a server over SSH, or inside a container. Terminal text editors run inside the terminal, and the two you’ll meet most are Nano and Vim.

Nano: simple

nano config.yaml

Type normally. The shortcuts are listed at the bottom: Ctrl+O saves (“write out”), Ctrl+X exits, Ctrl+W searches. If you just need to change a line, use this.

Vim (or vi): powerful, with modes

vim config.yaml

Vim has modes, which confuses everyone at first:

How to quit Vim, the famous problem:

Esc            make sure you're in normal mode
:w  Enter      save
:q  Enter      quit
:wq  Enter     save and quit
:q!  Enter     quit and discard changes

A minimal edit: i to start typing, Esc when finished, :wq to save and exit.

Other handy keys in normal mode: /word to search, dd to delete a line, yy to copy a line, p to paste, u to undo, gg and G to jump to the top or bottom.

Which to learn

• Everyone should know how to edit and exit with Nano, and how to survive in Vim.
• Many developers use Vim (or Neovim) daily, and love its speed, but it takes weeks to feel natural. Plenty of people instead use an editor with a “vim mode” extension.
• Emacs is the other classic.
• Setting the default editor: export EDITOR=nano, which Git and other tools use (for commit messages, for example, Git config).

You don’t have to love them. You just need to not get stuck.