GNU nano

Raised as a usability problem by 16 people on Hacker News over 7 years (2016–2022), in 6 threads.

People raised many different problems with GNU nano, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 16 complaints

Typed letters act as prompt input instead of inserting text, so keystrokes behave unexpectedly2022-12-28
Users can't tell what the ^X on screen means or which keys to press2022-12-28
Default keybindings differ from common GUI conventions, forcing users to learn a new scheme2022-12-28
Key chords require awkward hand positions and memorizing many arbitrary combinations2022-12-28
Each app uses a different shortcut to quit, with no system-wide convention2022-12-28
Users must search online to figure out how to exit nano2022-12-28
Unusual keyboard shortcuts are hard to learn and frustrate users getting work done2022-12-28
Save and exit use non-standard keys like Ctrl+O and Ctrl+X, unlike common shortcuts2022-04-28
Pressing Ctrl-S freezes the terminal with no visible indication in some terminals2022-04-28
Ctrl-S freezes the terminal with no feedback, so users are confused about what happened2022-04-28
Default keyboard shortcuts are hard for beginners to use2021-02-10
Users can't figure out how to quit, despite instructions shown on screen2020-07-30
Intuitive keys are wrong, and it keeps asking for more keypresses to exit2020-07-30
Help lines hidden by default, so occasional users cannot discover commands2020-07-30
Long lines were automatically hard-wrapped, an insane default that confuses beginners2019-03-24
Takes over 10 seconds to display a large file before it becomes usable2016-06-22