Nano (text editor)

In computing, nano is a curses-based text editor for Unix and Unix-like systems. It is a clone of Pico, the editor of the Pine email client. nano aims to emulate the functionality and easy-to-use interface of Pico, but without the tight mailer integration of the Pine/Pico package.

Released under the terms of the GNU General Public License, nano is free software. With the release of version 2.0.7 the license was changed from GPLv2 to GPLv3.

History

nano was first created in 1999 under the name TIP (TIP isn't Pico), by Chris Allegretta. His motivation was to create a free software replacement for Pico, since neither it nor Pine were distributed under a free software license. The name was officially changed to nano on January 10, 2000 to disambiguate it from the tip command. The name comes from the system of SI prefixes, where nano is 1000 times bigger than pico, though the backronym "nano's another editor" is sometimes used. In February 2001, nano became an official part of the GNU Project.

More recently, nano has added some features that Pico lacks, including colored text, regular expression search and replace, smooth scrolling, and multiple buffers.

On August 11, 2003, Chris Allegretta officially handed maintenance of nano's unstable branch to David Lawrence Ramsey. On December 20, 2007, David Lawrence Ramsey officially stepped down as nano's maintainer.

Currently under development in the 2.1 development series are rebindable key support and undo functionality

Control keys

nano, like Pico, is keyboard-oriented, controlled with control keys. For example, Control-O saves the current file; Control-W goes to the search menu. nano puts a two-line "shortcut bar" at the bottom of the screen, listing many of the commands available in the current context. For a complete list, Control-G gets the help screen.

Unlike Pico, nano uses meta keys to toggle its behavior. For example, Meta-S toggles smooth scrolling mode on and off. Almost all features that can be selected from the command line can be dynamically toggled.

Easter Eggs

If nano is compiled with the --enable-extra option passed to configure then: If the current file has been modified, and you press Ctrl-X at the edit window to exit, and you press "y" at the "Save modified buffer" prompt to save, and you enter "zzy" as the filename to save under (hence "xyzzy") the credits will display.

This only happens once each session.

See also

• List of text editors
• Comparison of text editors
• List of Unix programs

References

External links

• Project home page