I know this is a silly topic, but hey, it needed to be said somewhere:
When you’re editing your *.conf files, as long as their preferences are carefully set up correctly, your desktop text editors can usually be used instead of brutally minimalist and brutally oldschool text editors such as nano. The same goes for vim. You don’t need to use those.
We live in modern times now, and it’s okay to edit your *.conf files with featherpad, or mousepad, or geany, or gedit, etcetera. If you remember how to avoid the risks, heck, you could probably even use notepad++ in WINE or abiword.
The main pitfalls to avoid are the auto-formatting options.
But as long as you turn off all of the “automatic edits”, and make sure that you’re still reading/writing with a standard LINUX text format, say maybe UTF-8 without BOM, with linux linefeeds/formfeeds (I hope I got that right),… then it will be okay. Right?
UTF-8 is the standard “encoding”, and tends to be okay or even expected.
You can even paste ASCII text into a UTF-8 file and it will be okay, if I understand this correctly… As long as it’s saved as UTF-8 and has proper syntax and pragmatics and semantics, then you’re gold. A quick web search claims that *.conf files are often in a syntax similar to xml. But that’s different from ENCODING.
Stuff to avoid is of course settings for compatibility with microsoft windows systems, or specific “document” formats. Also to be avoided are optionals to add lines or to autocomplete syntax. You probably ought to avoid spelling and grammar checkers too if they are automatic. Of course converting tabs or spaces should be disabled too. What you need is the most simple and basic interaction without auto-saving backups or trying to do too much. Do you get what I’m saying?
Personally, I like using featherpad, because it’s easy to set up once you get used to it, and can open/write files without sudo permission. This isn’t a problem, because it doesn’t actually violate sudo/file protections: When you’re ready to save your changes, it will ask for your sudo password, kinda like pkexec, and only after you enter your password, will the changes be saved.
The advantage of using featherpad is; then you don’t have to drop into superuser mode just to edit a *.conf file. Instead, you navigate to the file and open for changes just like it was any other file. You only use your password if you otherwise don’t have access to the file. Featherpad is great that way; it handles the file permission gracefully without violations and without transgressions.
Another option is to use gedit. Gedit’s main advantage is that it has the ability to sort lines built in.
Or, you could use mousepad, which is installed by default on some distros.
Or, you could use pluma…
I think you see where I’m going with this.
As long as you’re not corrupting your own files with extra or missing data; as long as you’re not saving in the wrong text format; as long as words or lines aren’t missing, it’s going to be fine.
We have these fancy programs, why not use them?
Vim and nano still are celebrate and have their usage cases, I think for cron jobs maybe? But you don’t have to use those for basic configuration file edits.
The recently used items menus, the search and replace functions, the ability to pick legible fonts, etcetera… are all reasons why maybe you’d want to use more advanced text editors than vim or nano.
If you’re somebody who wants Linux to be user-friendly, please don’t recommend nano or vim, but instead teach people how to configure their advanced text editors to be safe enought to use on system configuration files.
Abiword might be a bit too complex, but hey, maybe not.
Thanks, that is all. 
P.S. - I know this technique works fine, because I’ve been editing GRUB and *.conf files and mirror lists for years now without nano and without vim. I even tend to remove those from my system installs.
Of course, there are plenty other nice efficient text editors so you might find different ones that you like that have other advantages too!
#pluma #mousepad #geany #featherpad #vim #nano #gedit
