Files missing in Beta 108

[DennisLfromGA]

I'm using the Pixelbook (Eve) and was wondering if it's just me or is anyone else missing vim and possibly other files in beta channel versions 15183.28.0 / 108.0.5359.24 ?

I switched back to the previously installed beta channel versions 15117.67.0 / 107.0.5304.51 where I still have vim and some other files under /usr/bin. 

I mounted the (ROOT-A) M108 version under /var/p5 and I'm using (ROOT-B) M107.

I compared  /usr/bin in each and discovered these files missing in M108:

chronos@localhost /var $ diff /usr/bin /var/p5/usr/bin 2>/dev/null | grep '^Only in'
Only in /usr/bin: ex
Only in /usr/bin: flatc
Only in /var/p5/usr/bin: ld.so
Only in /usr/bin: mojo_service_manager_launcher
Only in /usr/bin: rview
Only in /usr/bin: rvim
Only in /usr/bin: vi
Only in /usr/bin: view
Only in /usr/bin: vim
Only in /usr/bin: xxd

It seems really weird that vim would be removed, I'm hoping it's just my system that's experiencing this.

Thanx,

~DennyL

[Gwendal Grignou]

vim has been removed from the base image, replaced by nano. It is only
available in the test image. See
https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromiumos/overlays/chromiumos-overlay/+/3893292

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[DennisLfromGA]

Seriously? nano?

Could you please rethink this change? 

I have relied on vi / vim literally for decades, nano just doesn't cut it IMO.

~DennyL

[david....@gmail.com]

Another decades user of vi / vim. I would feel lost. 

[Gwendal Grignou]

On Tue, Nov 8, 2022 at 7:24 AM creature eternal
<creature...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On Tuesday, 8 November 2022 at 12:44:49 UTC david....@gmail.com wrote:
>>
>> Another decades user of vi / vim. I would feel lost.
>
>

> +1.

>
>>
>> On Monday, November 7, 2022 at 3:42:37 PM UTC-6 DennisLfromGA wrote:
>>>
>>> Seriously? nano?
>>>
>>> Could you please rethink this change?

We removed vim as the space in the root partition is very tight on
some chromebook with 2GB root partition. It saved ~8MB.
The expectation is power users who need vim for more than light
editing would do so in crostini/linux vm.

Gwendal.

[DennisLfromGA]

Gwen, and the ChromeOS team,

I realize that it is probably too late to canvas the user/developer base about
this change in editors to see what the majority of opinion might be.
Maybe that didn't matter to the ChromeOS team since it saves 97MiB and that was
more important.

It would have been nice though to have seen a PSA about this major change but I
didn't see one and I do subscribe to the Chromium-dev forum.

When I tried to invoke vi / vim I was just thrown the error:

    bash: vim: command not found

Absent any notification of this change that's a pretty scary error message for
developers that use & rely on vi / vim and leave them high & dry with no
apparent replacement.

I think it would be a good idea to replace vim with a script similar to the one
below so they would know what the intended replacement is:

    #!/bin/sh -e
    APPLICATION="${0##*/}"
    MILESTONE="M108"
    REPLACEMENT="nano"
    echo "'${APPLICATION}' is no longer installed in ${MILESTONE} and later."
    echo "'${REPLACEMENT}' is now installed and shall be used instead."


As an alternative to just removing vim and since crossystem and other means can
determine if a device is in Developer mode maybe add a script under
/usr/share/crosh/dev.d/ that would use a DLC or another method to install or ask
to install vim on devices in Developer mode. That way the user/developer could
decide if they wanted to use another 97MiB or not. This might be a good way to
appease Google, non-dev mode users & dev mode users all at the same time.


Also, I have a device using ChromeOS Flex on beta version M108 and it appears
that vim has been replaced by nano there too so the above suggestions would
apply to Flex too.


Thanx for your indulgence,
~DennyL

[damien Leisner]

Hi i am new to the  chromium OS discuss group can any of you walk me through it

[creature eternal]

On Tuesday, 8 November 2022 at 12:44:49 UTC david....@gmail.com wrote:

Another decades user of vi / vim. I would feel lost.

+1.

[Mike Frysinger]

to be frank, the majority opinion is irrelevant.  the facts are that vim is significantly larger than nano.  as Gwendal said, this change saves us ~8MB on the rootfs.  we have devices running out of space, so every MB is important to growing & maintaining CrOS.

nothing is stopping you from installing extra developer packages via `dev_install`.  vim is still available there.  this has been around since CrOS started over a decade ago.

doing heavy modification & editing from the commandline in a base image (i.e. not a dev/test image, and with no dev packages installed) is not a priority use case by any means.  only developers are doing that, and developers can install developer packages.

for quick/light editing, nano is more than sufficient, and has a drastically lower learning curve than just about every other terminal editor out there.

a psa prob should have been sent out, but too late at this point, and we have this thread now.

-mike

--

[DennisLfromGA]

Thanx for that explanation Mike, I get it, not everyone has a device with space to spare.

For some reason, I thought dev_install was deprecated, it's good to know that's still a viable alternative.

I guess there are other things like chromebrew and even a neovim appimage that would be a good substitute too, I just tried it and it works great.

I just can't get used to nano, it may be easier for some but when you've used vi for as long as I have it's hard to switch.

A PSA would've been nice but I guess the number of users in dev mode is pretty small so it's understandable.

Thanx again,

~DennyL

P.S. I'll be transitioning from a Pixelbook to a Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition very soon so I'll be even less concerned about space or RAM, unlike the typical user.

[Mike Frysinger]

yeah, i don't mean that changing muscle memory from vi to nano is easy, or even desirable.  i mean more that nano fills the gap of "i need to make this small change to bootstrap installing more stuff".

we've thrown around the idea of changing the dev packages to use dlc, but we'd keep the basic `dev_install` interface, and have it install the dlc or whatever for you.

-mike

[dragon788 (dragon788)]

@DennisLfromGA this finally was bugging me enough I tried Micro https://micro-editor.github.io/ , but while better than nano it still wasn't vim (and they haven't published a feature for modal editing or vim bindings), but then I discovered that nvim has a statically linked binary with very little extra bloat (they cut out TONS of legacy code) that can be snagged with a simple curl.

`sudo -i` first, then run this:

`cd /usr/local; curl -L https://github.com/neovim/neovim/releases/download/stable/nvim-linux64.tar.gz | tar --strip-components=1 -xzf -; cd bin; ln -s nvim vim;` and enjoy your familiar keybindings without any wasted space on the retail image.

If you run it as root you may get a warning about it not being able to create some files in /root/.local because that is part of the read-only rootfs, but it isn't fatal and can be ignored.

[Denny Lockhart]

Thanx for that, I hadn't tried the linux64 tarball but I might.
I've been using the neovim AppImage and it works well too.

~DennyL

[dragon788]

I might have to try the AppImage to see if it behaves better with running as root or the regular user without complaining about the $HOME/.local not being writable. I wasn't not sure how the AppImages might interact with ChromeOS since it doesn't seem to use a standard XDG layout with /home/chronos/user being the actual home directory (try `history -w` and you'll see a .bash_history file appear there) even though /home/chronos is the login for Developer Mode.

The other thing that pleasantly surprised me was the enabled by default syntax highlighting I got with nvim that was really handy for the scripts I was editing.

[Denny Lockhart]

dragon788,

When run as root the appimage still throws the 'E1187: Failed to source defaults.vim' error so without removing rootfs verification and adding a defaults.vim file I don't think it would be any better.

~DennyL

[dragon788 (dragon788)]

I think I figured out a way around the errors. Since nvim supports XDG paths and you can pass env vars into sudo with `sudo VARNAME=value -i` or for one-off commands `sudo -E`, you can set all the paths to /home/chronos/user or similar.

https://vi.stackexchange.com/a/38458/5159