nanovim
I have recently started using Ubuntu and hence, the terminal.
As text editor, I have used the pre-installed nano. Now I wonder whether I should install and use vim as well.
What are each of those text editors' special features, advantages and disadvantages? Which one is better suited for newcomers, and for what use cases would the other be preferable?
For gEdit
there does not seem to be a way to disable having a newline inserted at the end see this answer.
For Vim (and gVim
) you can - by executing the following option:
:set binary. Setting to binary will save the file as is and not insert a newline at the end of the document (Unless there already is one, in which it will be retained). At anytime you can revert this option with :set nobinary.
Nano is a little easier. You can launch nano with the
-L flag (or --nonewlines if you're more the visual type). This will disable the automatic addition of the newline to the end of the file (so long as one was not actually entered). Ideally you could setup this alias in your ~/.bashrc: alias nano="nano -L", which would launch Nano with the no newlines flag included in it!
Since I don't know exactly what you're doing I'm going to point you to Why should files end with a newline? which may explain why they're there. In short some applications will fail if they don't find an EOL directly before the EOF
Functionally, vim is almost a proper superset of vi. Therefore, everything that is in vi is available in vim.
Vim adds onto those features. Here are a some of the extended vim features:
There are many more differences. Refer below sources which are few of good places to start finding out more.
Source: Vim.Org, Vim on Wikpedia.
Hope it helps! :)
Best Answer
Vim and Nano are completely different terminal text editors.
Nano is simple, easy to use and master while Vim is powerful and tough to master.
To differentiate, it will be better to list some features of them. Since we don't use terminal editors for normal edits or coding, I'm listing some of the most interesting features that help for the way we use them today.
Nano:
Vim:
Although I hated Vim when I first met it, now I prefer it over Nano.