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I use nano when I need to edit something from CLI because I don't like ancient editors with modes or non-standard key combinations from 80s. And in nano the mos

I use nano when I need to edit something from CLI because I don't like ancient editors with modes or non-standard key combinations from 80s. And in nano the most important shortcuts are at least written in the bottom of screen. While nano supports some standard shortcuts (arrows, Ctrl + arrows, Home, End, PgUp, PgDn), others are non-standard and I don't understand why. For example, "save" is Ctrl + O instead of common Ctrl + S, exit is "Ctrl + X" instead of "Ctrl + Q", Esc doesn't work when you want to cancel search, and so on. What a nonsense. Why should someone use different shortcuts for the same function.

klyrs 4y ago
This made me chuckle. Pico was the first non-BASIC editor I used because the public library BBS used Pine. As a descendant of Pico, I'd say that Nano is an ancient editor, and it comes with all the historical baggage fueling your complaints.
soraminazuki 4y ago
It's not a good idea to use Ctrl + s and Ctrl + q as default keybindings for any important functionality on the terminal because terminals traditionally used them to stop/resume terminal output. Some terminal emulators still do this, so making people press those keys unwittingly would be problematic. So no, nano developers aren't being non-sensical here.
- adhesive_wombat 4y ago
  Yep, pressing Ctrl-S in a terminal and having it freeze up is extremely confusing at the best of times. Because I often (used to) press Ctrl-S as a reflex against certain crashy software, I'd not even really recall pressing it and then I'd wonder what the hell was going on. Then again, I have saved :wq into a few text files too!
  - cesarb 4y ago
    > Yep, pressing Ctrl-S in a terminal and having it freeze up is extremely confusing at the best of times. At least some terminals (IIRC, KDE's Konsole is one of them) show a helpful colored bar telling you that the output is paused and you should press Ctrl-Q to resume. Unfortunately, other popular terminals (like Gnome's gnome-terminal) don't have any visible indication for that.
  - gnubison 4y ago
    ‘stty -ixon’ disables this.
gnubison 4y ago
Actually, ^S does save, since 2017.
- currysausage 4y ago
  But you might have to put "stty -ixon" inside your .bashrc (or does nano take care of this?).
  - gnubison 4y ago
    Nano takes care of this, just like it disables line buffering (ICANON) and signal keys (ISIG).

klyrs 4y ago

This made me chuckle. Pico was the first non-BASIC editor I used because the public library BBS used Pine. As a descendant of Pico, I'd say that Nano is an ancient editor, and it comes with all the historical baggage fueling your complaints.

soraminazuki 4y ago

It's not a good idea to use Ctrl + s and Ctrl + q as default keybindings for any important functionality on the terminal because terminals traditionally used them to stop/resume terminal output. Some terminal emulators still do this, so making people press those keys unwittingly would be problematic. So no, nano developers aren't being non-sensical here.

adhesive_wombat 4y ago
Yep, pressing Ctrl-S in a terminal and having it freeze up is extremely confusing at the best of times. Because I often (used to) press Ctrl-S as a reflex against certain crashy software, I'd not even really recall pressing it and then I'd wonder what the hell was going on. Then again, I have saved :wq into a few text files too!
- cesarb 4y ago
  > Yep, pressing Ctrl-S in a terminal and having it freeze up is extremely confusing at the best of times. At least some terminals (IIRC, KDE's Konsole is one of them) show a helpful colored bar telling you that the output is paused and you should press Ctrl-Q to resume. Unfortunately, other popular terminals (like Gnome's gnome-terminal) don't have any visible indication for that.
- gnubison 4y ago
  ‘stty -ixon’ disables this.

gnubison 4y ago

Actually, ^S does save, since 2017.

currysausage 4y ago
But you might have to put "stty -ixon" inside your .bashrc (or does nano take care of this?).
- gnubison 4y ago
  Nano takes care of this, just like it disables line buffering (ICANON) and signal keys (ISIG).