10 ms·

GNU Nano 6.3

147 points by marcodiego 5y ago

rob74 5y ago
Interesting codenames, very cosmopolitan (if a bit cryptic). I can translate the Romanian ones: v6.1: "Social networks are like a fridge" v5.7: "All the others were plowing the fields"
fatcow 5y ago
So much fun in this editor. I'm surprised it is getting so much regular development. A breath of fresh air, it has helped edit many config files on remote shells.
- bombcar 5y ago
  From an editor that most people can exit to an actually powerful editor on its own right, nano has definitely evolved from just being a pico clone. It's really nice for config file editing if color-coding is enabled and supports the config file you're working on.
- waynecochran 5y ago
  Doesn't emacs have a nano mode?
  - klodolph 5y ago
    Maybe you can get one. I don’t see a nano mode in MELPA or GNU, and it doesn’t ship with Emacs. Nano is also much more likely to be installed than Emacs, especially since Apple stopped shipping Emacs with macOS.
    - jshier 5y ago
      Apple also stopping shipping nano with macOS (as of 12.3) and went back to pico.
      - klodolph 5y ago
        Huh, interesting. Nano is symlinked to pico. I never noticed, since I don’t use it.
        Fnoord 5y ago
        GNU Nano is GPLv3 which Apple boycots (its v3 since 2007 according to Wikipedia). Tells us GPLv3 works :-) not sure what the license of Pico is. My first text editor was Q&A on MSDOS, it relied on F-keys, and on Windows 9x I got used to ctrl as modifier. Pico/Pine and later Nano was a natural successor, easy to learn. I use Vim and ST now.
        assttoasstmgr 5y ago
        > not sure what the license of Pico is Apache 2.0. I've used pine as a mail reader for well over two decades at this point, mostly on big old UNIX boxes. GNU nano always felt like the knockoff version.
        Fnoord 5y ago
        Right,it got relicensed. Originally it was not available on e.g. Debian.
        sigzero 5y ago
        I don't even think Pico is in active development any more.
        sigzero 5y ago
        I wish they wouldn't do that. Nano is not Pico.
        klodolph 5y ago
        Vim isn't vi, but vi is usually symlinked to vim. And sh is very often a symlink to something like dash or bash.
  - gnulinux 5y ago
    Regardless emacs can take long to boot up (unless you invoke it with -Q) but nano is instant. So when I need to change one line of a file real quick, nano is the better tool imho.
    - melling 5y ago
      I haven’t used Emacs in a few years and I don’t remember the startup time being a problem. Maybe because I always left it running? Anyway, I looked up what people are saying these days. Looks like maybe a second or two? https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/m8d55l/what_is_your_startup_time/ https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/m8d55l/what_is_your_...
    - buescher 5y ago
      I like JED for that.
    - nanomonkey 5y ago
      Setting up emacs server pretty much solves this problem as each subsequent launch uses the same running daemon. After that you just set up an alias that launches emacsclient like the following: alias editor='emacsclient -t' alias visual='emacsclient -c -a emacs'
      - gnulinux 5y ago
        Unfortunately, I don't expect to have emacs server running in an EC2 instance intended to run a company service since it needs to be a copy of prod instance (for testing/development). In such instances nano is helpful.
        nanomonkey 5y ago
        Ah, yes that is where tramp emacs package comes in handy, as it allows one to edit remote files within your local instance of emacs. Note there is also helm-aws [https://github.com/istib/helm-aws https://github.com/istib/helm-aws] for managing AWS EC2 server instances directly from Emacs.
    - 5y ago
  - distantsounds 5y ago
    can't you just... use nano?
- warvariuc 5y ago
  Since I discovered micro[1], it's my go to editor. [1] https://micro-editor.github.io/ https://micro-editor.github.io/
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    Another Micro advocate! I agree, it's also my go-to editor. It's a great halfway point between breaking out Emacs and resorting to Nano. Micro is dead-simple and gets work done without any complication.
  - seanwilson 5y ago
    In Micro, selecting text using shift with left/right arrow works (across lines too), but is there a way to make it work when you press up/down arrows? And how do you shift select to the end of the line?
    - warvariuc 5y ago
      Works as usual for me (I am on a Mac). shift+up/down selects lines. shift+fn+right -- selects till the end of the line.
      - seanwilson 5y ago
        Thanks, hmm, so shift up/down deselects anything that was selected for me. Shift left/right works and mouse select works. Shift+fn+left/right makes me switch tab. I'm guessing my keyboard shortcuts are different compared to your setup but I don't remember changing anything here (using the regular Terminal app for Mac).
  - sph 5y ago
    micro > nano If it's not vim or emacs, a simple editor with CUA key binds should be the default everywhere, not nano. I love it.
- prmoustache 5y ago
  Is it that weird editor they tend to put on our distro these days were we end up having a lot of i x r R :s/foo/bar :w and :q embedded in the text and that we need to close quickly in fear of adding syntax error before doing an EDITOR=vi ?
  - ______-_-______ 5y ago
    Who is "we"? You might be the only person out there who types out 7 full vim commands before opening your eyes to look at what app is running
    - prmoustache 5y ago
      That was tongue in cheek. I would say the problem is not to not know which app you are using but muscular reflexes. Sames happen to me if I open gedit, notepad.exe or even an text processor such as writer or word. I had to put vim binding to make vscode bareable otherwise I kept making errors.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    Then `export EDITOR=vi` in your profile? Or in whichever global config file in /etc is appropriate, or possibly using your distro's alternatives system? This is an extremely solvable problem.
    - prmoustache 5y ago
      oh I didn't say it wasn't solvable, just that it catches me off guard every time I install a fresh new OS.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
        That's fair:) I would say that you should automate it by using ansible or something like that, but I've done that and there's still a very jarring few minutes while you're running the initial install and getting enough of a system for ansible to run on.
webmobdev 5y ago
I love Nano - it was the first terminal editor that I learned to use when Vi and other alternates seemed unnecessarily complex and felt masochistic (for someone who preferred a GUI for everything). (And on a hunch I just checked - Nano in macOS is still stuck at version 2.0.6!).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- adamomada 5y ago
  From a few comments above, you may be seeing pico instead of nano on latest Mac OS [0] https://osxdaily.com/2022/03/27/get-nano-text-editor-mac/ https://osxdaily.com/2022/03/27/get-nano-text-editor-mac/
  - webmobdev 5y ago
    No, I am on an older version of macOS and it is GNU Nano: $ nano --version GNU nano version 2.0.6 (compiled 19:02:51, Feb 22 2019) Email: nano@nano-editor.org Web: http://www.nano-editor.org/ http://www.nano-editor.org/ Compiled options: --disable-nls --enable-color --enable-extra --enable-multibuffer --enable-nanorc --enable-utf8 (Anyway, upgraded to the latest version from MacPorts - https://ports.macports.org/port/nano/ https://ports.macports.org/port/nano/ ).
dlandis 5y ago
I like nano for quick edits , but I was always bemused that it only gained an undo feature around the mid 2010s despite existing for many years before that.
lakomen 5y ago
My first shared hosting provider used some BSD, I don't remember which. It was way back in the early 2000s. I could log in via ssh. But at home I used Gentoo and I couldn't deal with the remote shell at first. I had to press scroll lock to scroll up and down, found it out by accident. I asked the hoster how to edit files. He said Pico ctrl+o ctrl+x to save and exit. Pico then became my editor, because vi was even more alien. I believe everyone has searched for "how to quit vi" once :) . Anyhow, I wanted Pico at home and found that it didn't either exist for Linux or wasn't maintained anymore. And that there was this nano thing now. And to this day I use "nano -w" to edit files remotely and sometimes even locally.
- bobochan 5y ago
  I had a similar path to nano. Pico was the default editor for the Pine email client, and I still use Alpine for work decades later. I am generally an emacs user, but nano / pico definitely feel familiar and comfortable.
  - cf100clunk 5y ago
    Same background for me and I'm quite literate with vi and emacs if/as needed, so now Alpine (email client) and nano are one-for-one replacements.
Decabytes 5y ago
As an Emacs user I never really understood why Nano was so popular when you could use Emacs, but I've since learned a few things... 1. Emacs isn't always on all the systems, and getting it downloaded/setup can be a pain in the butt 2. Sometimes it's just easier to launch nano quickly to edit one line in a .bashrc from the command line 3. When I bork Emacs and it doesn't work, it's nice to be able to fall back on a simple editor to edit my .emacs.d 4. It's nice to have an alternative to vi with keybindings I'm more familiar with
- eixiepia 5y ago
  5. Sometimes you don't need an operating system, but a decent editor and that's where Nano come in :)
- zdkl 5y ago
  > I never really understood why Nano was so popular when you could use Emacs > When I bork Emacs and it doesn't work Only 50 % joking but like you said it's not if, it's when. Nano is there and works.
  - avgcorrection 5y ago
    `emacs --quick`?
  - anthk 5y ago
    emacs -q
- NelsonMinar 5y ago
  Back in the 90s the joke was "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping". 8mb is nothing now and I note that Nano, with no file open, is 6768kb virtual and 3620kb resident on my x86_64 Linux box. (I use mg as my small emacs alternative; full emacs UI but tiny binary / memory. Unfortunately it doesn't support Unicode properly.)
  - anthk 5y ago
    Check jmacs from joe.
politelemon 5y ago
I was introduced to nano when I did a `crontab -e` for the first time, and it had an ASCII arrow pointing at nano, saying 'easiest'. I tried it and realized it was perfect for quickly editing a file and getting out. I use it when guiding people unfamiliar with the CLI and they seem more comfortable with its shortcuts, as opposed to vi. My Ubuntu is a bit behind, is this the official PPA for nano, or good enough? https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nano https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nano
jjice 5y ago
Nano helped me edit config files on a Raspberry Pi when I was 15 - very grateful for it for those moment. I use vim for remote editing and notes now as I've gotten familiar and prefer it, but Nano absolutely has it's place.
- Lambdanaut 5y ago
  In high school I'd have to wait a few hours in the library every evening to be picked up, so I set up an SSH server at home and had my laptop with me. I didn't know about GIT at that time, so I'd SSH into my home server and edit files on the fly with Nano. I actually coded quite a bit, and built a basic social networking app fully in nano. Looking back I have no idea how I did it. Anything less than an IDE with VIM-mode is a no-go for me these days.
freedomben 5y ago
tldr: Main focus this release is on performance/optimization. Multiline regexes, and colorization improvements (including NO_COLOR env var to disable). Support added for xsel (although it seems like most distros aren't using x anymore but better late than never!).
- marcodiego 5y ago
  The fact is not that it now supports "xsel", the fact is a bug was fixed that prevented its usage.
cosmiccatnap 5y ago
I wish back in the day people coming from windows were shown nano/pico instead of vi. If they had known there was something very analogous to dos edit I would think more windows people wouldn't have the experience with Unix they seem to have had. Even today I am not a vim purist. I tell people to try nano out at first and work their way up to emacs or vim cause in the real world most people are just changing a line in etc that broke something.
latchkey 5y ago
I do an Ubuntu based PXE deployment to over 10k servers. I still put nano on there.
ndm000 5y ago
I am teaching my 10 year old Python using Nano, and he’s picked it up surprisingly quickly. When I wanted him to upgrade to VS Code, he preferred the terminal! Nano’s a great product, thanks for the hard work on it all.
- teaearlgraycold 5y ago
  Sounds great. Starting small makes sense. I wrote my first code in MS Notepad. Then used Notepad++. I use VS Code these days but can’t see what it would have done for me as a child.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
shortlived 5y ago
Give me Vi or give me death! JK - glad to see Nano is still being developed. It was my first editor on Linux before I could learn Vi/m.
- blippage 5y ago
  > Give me Vi or give me death! When I was doing my PhD back in the 90's, I was mostly using Windows 3.11 and writing in Fortran. My editor: Notepad. Seems incredible now. The big boys doing other research had Unix boxes, big expensive Silicon Graphics machines of various colours, I believe. One of the programmers explained to me that vi was an excellent editor, and how you used h,j,k,l to move around. I kinda rolled my eyes and thought he was mad. A systems programmer also suggested that I used "make". I couldn't understand the point of that, as that was what batch files were for. Roll on to the present day, and vim is my editor of choice. I did flirt with emacs at one point, but gave it up as too much configuration is involved. On vim, I do virtually no configuration. I have no plugins whatsoever, although I have set up a few custom bits and pieces in .vimrc. With just one file, it makes it very easy to bring up a new machine for me. I've come to the conclusion that emacs and vim are very different philosophies. With emacs, it works the way you want. With vim, you work they way vim wants. So ditch your plugins, and use vim the way nature intended. Before doing my PhD, I did a masters jointly split between two universities. I think you can tell a lot about universities by what computer systems they have. One university had a lot of Sun systems. The file servers were prone to the odd hiccup, mind. At the other university, it was mostly Windows systems. In order to program in Fortran, we had to log into the university's computer (it was some Unix system, although I don't know specifics) via telnet, or something. And use "ed". Boy, was there some bellyaching from the students over that one! I always preferred the university with the proper Unix workstations. The Windows ones always seemed a bit of a joke, without proper software like Maple (IIRC).
JCWasmx86 5y ago
nano is the first thing I always install on a fresh install (If it is not already preinstalled)
mrweasel 5y ago
One of my former co-workers loves Nano. It does what he needs, it was installed on all our systems, if not it is safe to just apt-get install it. Most of our documentation said this like "edit this line in this file, using: vi <path to file>." Every time he wrote documentation, or updated existing, he'd change "vi" to "nano". It always makes me smile and think about him when I spot "nano" somewhere in the documentation.
- rob74 5y ago
  Nano's great advantage over vi(m) is that you can instantly see how you can save the current file and exit the editor, e.g. when confronted with it because of a "git commit" on some server. So, if you configure an editor that anyone should be able to use, I would prefer Nano too...
- cesarb 5y ago
  > Every time he wrote documentation, or updated existing, he'd change "vi" to "nano". It might be better to change it to "nano -w" instead; IIRC, some versions of nano hard-wrap lines by default (which corrupts files where line breaks are significant) unless you remember to always use "nano -w".
  - juangacovas 5y ago
    You can add a "set nowrap" line into your home ".nanorc" file so "-w" is applied by default.
    - cesarb 5y ago
      Relying on configuration, either in your home ".nanorc" or in its /etc equivalent, is too risky; you might be using ssh (or docker/podman/etc) to a machine or VM or container which doesn't have that configuration. It's the same for relying on having a nano version where that's the compiled-in default; you might be using a machine or VM or container with a different nano version than you're used to. It's less risky to always type "nano -w" everywhere (or use a different editor, one which never had hard-wrap enabled by default in any version).
pachico 5y ago
Since I was a little kid my nickname was Nano. One day I found an editor named Nano and I've been using it since :)
cjohansson 5y ago
Nano is great, when I did not know how to use vi, vim or emacs I used nano. Nowdays for quick edits in terminal on unexplored servers I use vi. emacs and vim are not always installed
rgovostes 5y ago
Apple was shipping nano 2.0.6—from 2007!—until the current mid-cycle release, macOS 12.3. Probably due to newer releases of nano being GPLv3, they quietly replaced it with pico, which unfortunately lacks the critical Go To Line (^-) function.
rurban 5y ago
I recently switched from joe to nano on small remote boxes, because it's there. I'm still having issues to move lines around. Cannot get rid of my 80ies habits of C-k b, C-k e

147 points by marcodiego 5y ago

Interesting codenames, very cosmopolitan (if a bit cryptic). I can translate the Romanian ones: v6.1: "Social networks are like a fridge" v5.7: "All the others were plowing the fields"

fatcow 5y ago

So much fun in this editor. I'm surprised it is getting so much regular development. A breath of fresh air, it has helped edit many config files on remote shells.

bombcar 5y ago
From an editor that most people can exit to an actually powerful editor on its own right, nano has definitely evolved from just being a pico clone. It's really nice for config file editing if color-coding is enabled and supports the config file you're working on.
waynecochran 5y ago
Doesn't emacs have a nano mode?
- klodolph 5y ago
  Maybe you can get one. I don’t see a nano mode in MELPA or GNU, and it doesn’t ship with Emacs. Nano is also much more likely to be installed than Emacs, especially since Apple stopped shipping Emacs with macOS.
  - jshier 5y ago
    Apple also stopping shipping nano with macOS (as of 12.3) and went back to pico.
    - klodolph 5y ago
      Huh, interesting. Nano is symlinked to pico. I never noticed, since I don’t use it.
      - Fnoord 5y ago
        GNU Nano is GPLv3 which Apple boycots (its v3 since 2007 according to Wikipedia). Tells us GPLv3 works :-) not sure what the license of Pico is. My first text editor was Q&A on MSDOS, it relied on F-keys, and on Windows 9x I got used to ctrl as modifier. Pico/Pine and later Nano was a natural successor, easy to learn. I use Vim and ST now.
        assttoasstmgr 5y ago
        > not sure what the license of Pico is Apache 2.0. I've used pine as a mail reader for well over two decades at this point, mostly on big old UNIX boxes. GNU nano always felt like the knockoff version.
        Fnoord 5y ago
        Right,it got relicensed. Originally it was not available on e.g. Debian.
        sigzero 5y ago
        I don't even think Pico is in active development any more.
      - sigzero 5y ago
        I wish they wouldn't do that. Nano is not Pico.
        klodolph 5y ago
        Vim isn't vi, but vi is usually symlinked to vim. And sh is very often a symlink to something like dash or bash.
- gnulinux 5y ago
  Regardless emacs can take long to boot up (unless you invoke it with -Q) but nano is instant. So when I need to change one line of a file real quick, nano is the better tool imho.
  - melling 5y ago
    I haven’t used Emacs in a few years and I don’t remember the startup time being a problem. Maybe because I always left it running? Anyway, I looked up what people are saying these days. Looks like maybe a second or two? https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/m8d55l/what_is_your_startup_time/ https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/m8d55l/what_is_your_...
  - buescher 5y ago
    I like JED for that.
  - nanomonkey 5y ago
    Setting up emacs server pretty much solves this problem as each subsequent launch uses the same running daemon. After that you just set up an alias that launches emacsclient like the following: alias editor='emacsclient -t' alias visual='emacsclient -c -a emacs'
    - gnulinux 5y ago
      Unfortunately, I don't expect to have emacs server running in an EC2 instance intended to run a company service since it needs to be a copy of prod instance (for testing/development). In such instances nano is helpful.
      - nanomonkey 5y ago
        Ah, yes that is where tramp emacs package comes in handy, as it allows one to edit remote files within your local instance of emacs. Note there is also helm-aws [https://github.com/istib/helm-aws https://github.com/istib/helm-aws] for managing AWS EC2 server instances directly from Emacs.
  - 5y ago
- distantsounds 5y ago
  can't you just... use nano?
warvariuc 5y ago
Since I discovered micro[1], it's my go to editor. [1] https://micro-editor.github.io/ https://micro-editor.github.io/
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Another Micro advocate! I agree, it's also my go-to editor. It's a great halfway point between breaking out Emacs and resorting to Nano. Micro is dead-simple and gets work done without any complication.
- seanwilson 5y ago
  In Micro, selecting text using shift with left/right arrow works (across lines too), but is there a way to make it work when you press up/down arrows? And how do you shift select to the end of the line?
  - warvariuc 5y ago
    Works as usual for me (I am on a Mac). shift+up/down selects lines. shift+fn+right -- selects till the end of the line.
    - seanwilson 5y ago
      Thanks, hmm, so shift up/down deselects anything that was selected for me. Shift left/right works and mouse select works. Shift+fn+left/right makes me switch tab. I'm guessing my keyboard shortcuts are different compared to your setup but I don't remember changing anything here (using the regular Terminal app for Mac).
- sph 5y ago
  micro > nano If it's not vim or emacs, a simple editor with CUA key binds should be the default everywhere, not nano. I love it.
prmoustache 5y ago
Is it that weird editor they tend to put on our distro these days were we end up having a lot of i x r R :s/foo/bar :w and :q embedded in the text and that we need to close quickly in fear of adding syntax error before doing an EDITOR=vi ?
- ______-_-______ 5y ago
  Who is "we"? You might be the only person out there who types out 7 full vim commands before opening your eyes to look at what app is running
  - prmoustache 5y ago
    That was tongue in cheek. I would say the problem is not to not know which app you are using but muscular reflexes. Sames happen to me if I open gedit, notepad.exe or even an text processor such as writer or word. I had to put vim binding to make vscode bareable otherwise I kept making errors.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  Then `export EDITOR=vi` in your profile? Or in whichever global config file in /etc is appropriate, or possibly using your distro's alternatives system? This is an extremely solvable problem.
  - prmoustache 5y ago
    oh I didn't say it wasn't solvable, just that it catches me off guard every time I install a fresh new OS.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      That's fair:) I would say that you should automate it by using ansible or something like that, but I've done that and there's still a very jarring few minutes while you're running the initial install and getting enough of a system for ansible to run on.

webmobdev 5y ago

I love Nano - it was the first terminal editor that I learned to use when Vi and other alternates seemed unnecessarily complex and felt masochistic (for someone who preferred a GUI for everything). (And on a hunch I just checked - Nano in macOS is still stuck at version 2.0.6!).

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
adamomada 5y ago
From a few comments above, you may be seeing pico instead of nano on latest Mac OS [0] https://osxdaily.com/2022/03/27/get-nano-text-editor-mac/ https://osxdaily.com/2022/03/27/get-nano-text-editor-mac/
- webmobdev 5y ago
  No, I am on an older version of macOS and it is GNU Nano: $ nano --version GNU nano version 2.0.6 (compiled 19:02:51, Feb 22 2019) Email: nano@nano-editor.org Web: http://www.nano-editor.org/ http://www.nano-editor.org/ Compiled options: --disable-nls --enable-color --enable-extra --enable-multibuffer --enable-nanorc --enable-utf8 (Anyway, upgraded to the latest version from MacPorts - https://ports.macports.org/port/nano/ https://ports.macports.org/port/nano/ ).

dlandis 5y ago

I like nano for quick edits , but I was always bemused that it only gained an undo feature around the mid 2010s despite existing for many years before that.

lakomen 5y ago

My first shared hosting provider used some BSD, I don't remember which. It was way back in the early 2000s. I could log in via ssh. But at home I used Gentoo and I couldn't deal with the remote shell at first. I had to press scroll lock to scroll up and down, found it out by accident. I asked the hoster how to edit files. He said Pico ctrl+o ctrl+x to save and exit. Pico then became my editor, because vi was even more alien. I believe everyone has searched for "how to quit vi" once :) . Anyhow, I wanted Pico at home and found that it didn't either exist for Linux or wasn't maintained anymore. And that there was this nano thing now. And to this day I use "nano -w" to edit files remotely and sometimes even locally.

bobochan 5y ago
I had a similar path to nano. Pico was the default editor for the Pine email client, and I still use Alpine for work decades later. I am generally an emacs user, but nano / pico definitely feel familiar and comfortable.
- cf100clunk 5y ago
  Same background for me and I'm quite literate with vi and emacs if/as needed, so now Alpine (email client) and nano are one-for-one replacements.

Decabytes 5y ago

As an Emacs user I never really understood why Nano was so popular when you could use Emacs, but I've since learned a few things... 1. Emacs isn't always on all the systems, and getting it downloaded/setup can be a pain in the butt 2. Sometimes it's just easier to launch nano quickly to edit one line in a .bashrc from the command line 3. When I bork Emacs and it doesn't work, it's nice to be able to fall back on a simple editor to edit my .emacs.d 4. It's nice to have an alternative to vi with keybindings I'm more familiar with

eixiepia 5y ago
5. Sometimes you don't need an operating system, but a decent editor and that's where Nano come in :)
zdkl 5y ago
> I never really understood why Nano was so popular when you could use Emacs > When I bork Emacs and it doesn't work Only 50 % joking but like you said it's not if, it's when. Nano is there and works.
- avgcorrection 5y ago
  `emacs --quick`?
- anthk 5y ago
  emacs -q
NelsonMinar 5y ago
Back in the 90s the joke was "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping". 8mb is nothing now and I note that Nano, with no file open, is 6768kb virtual and 3620kb resident on my x86_64 Linux box. (I use mg as my small emacs alternative; full emacs UI but tiny binary / memory. Unfortunately it doesn't support Unicode properly.)
- anthk 5y ago
  Check jmacs from joe.

politelemon 5y ago

I was introduced to nano when I did a `crontab -e` for the first time, and it had an ASCII arrow pointing at nano, saying 'easiest'. I tried it and realized it was perfect for quickly editing a file and getting out. I use it when guiding people unfamiliar with the CLI and they seem more comfortable with its shortcuts, as opposed to vi. My Ubuntu is a bit behind, is this the official PPA for nano, or good enough? https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nano https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nano

jjice 5y ago

Nano helped me edit config files on a Raspberry Pi when I was 15 - very grateful for it for those moment. I use vim for remote editing and notes now as I've gotten familiar and prefer it, but Nano absolutely has it's place.

Lambdanaut 5y ago
In high school I'd have to wait a few hours in the library every evening to be picked up, so I set up an SSH server at home and had my laptop with me. I didn't know about GIT at that time, so I'd SSH into my home server and edit files on the fly with Nano. I actually coded quite a bit, and built a basic social networking app fully in nano. Looking back I have no idea how I did it. Anything less than an IDE with VIM-mode is a no-go for me these days.

freedomben 5y ago

tldr: Main focus this release is on performance/optimization. Multiline regexes, and colorization improvements (including NO_COLOR env var to disable). Support added for xsel (although it seems like most distros aren't using x anymore but better late than never!).

marcodiego 5y ago
The fact is not that it now supports "xsel", the fact is a bug was fixed that prevented its usage.

cosmiccatnap 5y ago

I wish back in the day people coming from windows were shown nano/pico instead of vi. If they had known there was something very analogous to dos edit I would think more windows people wouldn't have the experience with Unix they seem to have had. Even today I am not a vim purist. I tell people to try nano out at first and work their way up to emacs or vim cause in the real world most people are just changing a line in etc that broke something.

latchkey 5y ago

I do an Ubuntu based PXE deployment to over 10k servers. I still put nano on there.

ndm000 5y ago

I am teaching my 10 year old Python using Nano, and he’s picked it up surprisingly quickly. When I wanted him to upgrade to VS Code, he preferred the terminal! Nano’s a great product, thanks for the hard work on it all.

teaearlgraycold 5y ago
Sounds great. Starting small makes sense. I wrote my first code in MS Notepad. Then used Notepad++. I use VS Code these days but can’t see what it would have done for me as a child.
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shortlived 5y ago

Give me Vi or give me death! JK - glad to see Nano is still being developed. It was my first editor on Linux before I could learn Vi/m.

blippage 5y ago
> Give me Vi or give me death! When I was doing my PhD back in the 90's, I was mostly using Windows 3.11 and writing in Fortran. My editor: Notepad. Seems incredible now. The big boys doing other research had Unix boxes, big expensive Silicon Graphics machines of various colours, I believe. One of the programmers explained to me that vi was an excellent editor, and how you used h,j,k,l to move around. I kinda rolled my eyes and thought he was mad. A systems programmer also suggested that I used "make". I couldn't understand the point of that, as that was what batch files were for. Roll on to the present day, and vim is my editor of choice. I did flirt with emacs at one point, but gave it up as too much configuration is involved. On vim, I do virtually no configuration. I have no plugins whatsoever, although I have set up a few custom bits and pieces in .vimrc. With just one file, it makes it very easy to bring up a new machine for me. I've come to the conclusion that emacs and vim are very different philosophies. With emacs, it works the way you want. With vim, you work they way vim wants. So ditch your plugins, and use vim the way nature intended. Before doing my PhD, I did a masters jointly split between two universities. I think you can tell a lot about universities by what computer systems they have. One university had a lot of Sun systems. The file servers were prone to the odd hiccup, mind. At the other university, it was mostly Windows systems. In order to program in Fortran, we had to log into the university's computer (it was some Unix system, although I don't know specifics) via telnet, or something. And use "ed". Boy, was there some bellyaching from the students over that one! I always preferred the university with the proper Unix workstations. The Windows ones always seemed a bit of a joke, without proper software like Maple (IIRC).

JCWasmx86 5y ago

nano is the first thing I always install on a fresh install (If it is not already preinstalled)

mrweasel 5y ago

One of my former co-workers loves Nano. It does what he needs, it was installed on all our systems, if not it is safe to just apt-get install it. Most of our documentation said this like "edit this line in this file, using: vi <path to file>." Every time he wrote documentation, or updated existing, he'd change "vi" to "nano". It always makes me smile and think about him when I spot "nano" somewhere in the documentation.

rob74 5y ago
Nano's great advantage over vi(m) is that you can instantly see how you can save the current file and exit the editor, e.g. when confronted with it because of a "git commit" on some server. So, if you configure an editor that anyone should be able to use, I would prefer Nano too...
cesarb 5y ago
> Every time he wrote documentation, or updated existing, he'd change "vi" to "nano". It might be better to change it to "nano -w" instead; IIRC, some versions of nano hard-wrap lines by default (which corrupts files where line breaks are significant) unless you remember to always use "nano -w".
- juangacovas 5y ago
  You can add a "set nowrap" line into your home ".nanorc" file so "-w" is applied by default.
  - cesarb 5y ago
    Relying on configuration, either in your home ".nanorc" or in its /etc equivalent, is too risky; you might be using ssh (or docker/podman/etc) to a machine or VM or container which doesn't have that configuration. It's the same for relying on having a nano version where that's the compiled-in default; you might be using a machine or VM or container with a different nano version than you're used to. It's less risky to always type "nano -w" everywhere (or use a different editor, one which never had hard-wrap enabled by default in any version).

pachico 5y ago

Since I was a little kid my nickname was Nano. One day I found an editor named Nano and I've been using it since :)

cjohansson 5y ago

Nano is great, when I did not know how to use vi, vim or emacs I used nano. Nowdays for quick edits in terminal on unexplored servers I use vi. emacs and vim are not always installed

rgovostes 5y ago

Apple was shipping nano 2.0.6—from 2007!—until the current mid-cycle release, macOS 12.3. Probably due to newer releases of nano being GPLv3, they quietly replaced it with pico, which unfortunately lacks the critical Go To Line (^-) function.

rurban 5y ago

I recently switched from joe to nano on small remote boxes, because it's there. I'm still having issues to move lines around. Cannot get rid of my 80ies habits of C-k b, C-k e