{"id":467,"date":"2007-11-04T20:55:12","date_gmt":"2007-11-05T03:55:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/dear-nano\/"},"modified":"2007-11-04T20:55:12","modified_gmt":"2007-11-05T03:55:12","slug":"dear-nano","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/dear-nano\/","title":{"rendered":"Dear Nano"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dear Nano<\/a>: You know I love you. You are the GPL’d heir to the old UW-Pine-derived<\/a> Pico editor, my text-editing savior when I was unceremoniously thrust onto the Unix command line early in my computer science education and told to write a program.<\/p>\n

However, clever error messages may seem funny to you but are actually aggravating to the end user due to their failure to actually articulate what went wrong:<\/p>\n


\n\"GNU
\n<\/center><\/p>\n

This is not helpful when a user is trying to be productive and honestly has no idea what misstep just occurred. Fortunately, I have been using using GNU Nano long enough to know that “Come on, be reasonable” usually means that, rather than pressing Ctrl-W to search for text, I mistakenly pressed Ctrl-\/ (go to line number) and entered a non-numeric value.<\/p>\n

I wonder if non-English-speaking users have to put up with the same error message? Using my limited ability to interpret non-English languages, I delved into the .po files in the Nano source. Well, what do you know?<\/p>\n

de.po:<\/p>\n

\r\nmsgid \"Come on, be reasonable\"\r\nmsgstr \"Komm schon, sei vern\u00fcnftig\"\r\n<\/pre>\n
fr.po:<\/p>\n
\r\nmsgid \"Come on, be reasonable\"\r\nmsgstr \"Allez, soyez raisonnable\"\r\n<\/pre>\n
it.po:<\/p>\n
\r\nmsgid \"Come on, be reasonable\"\r\nmsgstr \"Avanti, sii ragionevole\"\r\n<\/pre>\n
This is especially egregious since “come on” is literally translated and I doubt that the idiom has the same connotation in other languages.<\/p>\n
Thankfully, a brief perusal of the other msgid strings does not immediately reveal any other unintuitive errors. As a bonus, I just figured out that Nano must have a bracket-matching feature due the presence of such strings as “Not a bracket” and “No matching bracket”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dear Nano: You know I love you. You are the GPL’d heir to the old UW-Pine-derived Pico editor, my text-editing savior when I was unceremoniously thrust onto the Unix command line early in my computer science education and told to write a program. However, clever error messages may seem funny to you but are actually […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[39,38,40,41,42],"class_list":["post-467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-gnu-gpl","tag-nano","tag-pico","tag-pine","tag-text-editing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}