Nano has already supplanted the great EMacs and Vim as the most popular text editor of all linux distros, for though it has many omissions in functionality it scores over the older, more complete programs in two important respects. First, it is slightly simpler; and secondly it has the text “^ Exit” inscribed in highlighted text on its footer
EDIT : This sees to be going over some people’s heads. It’s a hitchiker’s guide to the galaxy reference.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions . . . it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
Big fan of micro. Like nano, it’s non-modal, but unlike nano, it doesn’t need to print its shortcuts on the bottom because everyone already knows most of the shortcuts from almost every GUI editor. And it has inbuilt syntax highlighting and LSP support (TBH it’s a bit much at times, the UI is a bit too intrusive to (by default) complain every time you violate some style guideline).
Though that’s moot if you don’t have admin privileges on the box you’re working on.
nano -xmay be more to your liking then. Ornano -0if you like being terrified.Hints: Ctrl+X still works to quit. Alt-Z and Alt-X toggle the title and the help respectively.
You can also use the toggles in regular
nanoto hide one or the other if you’re bothered by them.The UI isn’t the issue with nano, it’s that it needs that kind of UI … you could memorize nano’s shortcuts, but it doesn’t have enough features to justify the effort.
What extra features do you think it ought to have?
It’s not that they want more features - it’s that in micro for instance copy is ctrl+c which everyone already knows, where in nano it’s different
Then you want
nano -/which uses the modern key bindings. They’ve been in nano for a while now.For historical reasons, it doesn’t use them by default.
Yup they could use
nano -/0, or they could just use micro.A note: I couldn’t find
-/referenced online easily though when I checked it is indeed there. On Macnanoredirects topicoby default which doesn’t have that either. I think it’s understandable someone would just choose to use microTo flog this dead horse just a bit longer, micro is nearly seven times the size of nano, and Apple are clearly doing it wrong. Pointing an old name at a new thing is fine as long as there’s backward compatibility, but a new name at an old thing that doesn’t support the same features is a disservice to the old thing, the new thing and the user.
Still starts up instantly, though, and still smaller than practically every GUI editor.
$ nano -/ test.txt nano: invalid option -- '/'So much for that. Is this a really new option, or does it require a compilation flag that Debian doesn’t bother with?
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Well, micro has syntax highlighting and LSP support, and vim is just really efficient at text editing … though nano’s feature set is honestly fine for what it is, I’d much rather it used well-known shortcuts by default.
Asking nano to use the modern keybinds by default is akin to insisting that Emacs run in evil mode by default. If you really must have it do that, set up a shell alias or put something in your .nanorc.
Also, nano has syntax highlighting. No LSP though. It’s an editor, not an IDE.
Maybe that explains the size difference I was talking about elsewhere.