This way gets coolness points, HN headlines, makes the programmers who wrote it happy, and probably is a contribution to making a couple of autistic people feel included.
Rust + EDITOR.COM is kind of like remaking/remastering an old video game.
micro would have been an even better choice, the UX is impressively close to something like Sublime Text for a TUI, and very comfortable for those not used to modal editors.
I like micro and use it occasionally. I like this even more. I booted up the editor and instantly thought “it would be nice if there was a clickable buffer list right about…” and then realized my mouse was hovering over it. My next instant thought was that micro should have implemented this feature a long time ago
does nano support mouse usage? It doesn't seem to work for me (but maybe it just needs to be enabled somewhere)
I guess they thought that inheriting 25 years of C code was more trouble than designing a new editor from scratch. But you'd have to ask the devs why they decided to go down that route
This is not a rewrite. Maybe it’s slightly inspired by the old thing, especially with having GUI-style clickable menus (something not seen often in terminal editors), but it’s much more modern.
It does seem "modern" in the sense that it is incredibly limited in functionality (EDIT.COM from DOS is much more full-featured) and deviates from well-established UI conventions.
CUA-style menubars aren't that uncommon in textmode editors. Midnight Commander's editor has traditional menubars with much more extensive functionality, as does jedsoft.org's Jed editor. Both of these also support mouse input on the TTY console via GPM, not just within a graphical terminal.
