Customize Nano Text Editor (2022)(shafi.ddns.net) |
Customize Nano Text Editor (2022)(shafi.ddns.net) |
A tool is only as good as its ease of use and clarity of its documentation, imho.
E.g. I have a configuration which allows me to use nano while editing pdf side-by-side, and be able to click on the pdf and land in the correct line in nano, and vice-versa. (and obviously compiling the latex document itself happens via a custom keystroke).
I think they recently added Ctrl+S to save by default, even if unconfigured, woohoo.
They told me it had always been this way and I felt stupid for a bit. Good to know it's a recent addition.
XOFF ignored, mumble mumble
[1]: https://github.com/chawyehsu/dotfiles/blob/main/.config/nano...
The pine authors fell foul of the Debian free software guidelines and, as well as nano, a clone for the mail client itself lives on to this day as alpine. I use it every so often for a spot of nostalgia.
I still tend to muscle memory my way through using Nano when I need to do quick file edits on Linux.
It's also possible that you simply do NOT have nano installed at all, and just have the simlink from nano to pico by default. That was my case. In this situation, install nano and it should work.
Since forever, GNU readline programs and nano had identical bindings. I'm fast moving around the CLI because I'm fast at nano. Emacs has the same defaults. What sane organization only abandons their own defaults and prioritizes that work after pushing the existing maintainer out (or irritating them enough to accomplish this)?
bind ^B back main
bind M-f nextword main
bind M-b prevword main
I don't regularly use nano anymore, but I have often thought that more programs should imitate the way it shows the command shortcuts on-screen as a kind of instant tutorial. I remember my physics major friends in college thinking it was pure snobbery for vi not to do that by default. Back then we were dialing in to an HP-UX server and using pico, which nano is an open-source clone of. For those who aren't aware, pico was originally the editor component of the Pine email client.
I don't think it is snobbery, that approach would clutter the entire screen. Basically every single small/capital letter and symbol has a function in vim.
I believe that Nano and Pico copied it from Wordstar.
Also kind of reminds me of the old Telix terminal software for MS-DOS, with the bottom status bar. Not exactly the same, but again quite similar in the approach to have you just quick glance at the bottom of your screen for a HUD.
Even basic things like how shell history is managed is very annoying to configure every single time. if only it was as simple as cloning your private github repo to ~/.config.
Maybe not everybody can switch so easily, but I think it's worth trying out. (One change that absolutely does trip me up is capslock->control. If I try using somebody else's computer, I constantly enable capslock by accident.)
Most of the time, I can manage without, but every now and again I've needed to do some thing or other, and I've been grateful to have my own preferred setup rather than somebody else's.
Definitely going to enable mouse support. Didn’t know that was possible.
10 years I've spent mastering the shortcuts.
I have been using nano in hard mode.
These configs will make my life so much easier.
1) integrating cscope with nano?
2) integrating exuberant ctags with nano?
3) integrating universal ctags with nano?
3) any sane advice on pattern matching (say find, or find and replace) where newlines, tabs etc can be part of query, part of the substitution?
By comparison nano is everywhere and was super-simple to configure and spruce-up with custom functions, so it just stuck with me.
As for other competitors, when comparing to vim, I find it much simpler to use, and to the surprise of most vim users I speak to, equally powerful (at least for my needs).
(Because tone doesn't always come across, I'm asking out of curiosity, not to like challenge you about it.)
Since version 8.0, to be newcomer friendly, ^F starts a forward
search, ^B starts a backward search, M-F searches the next occurrence
forward, and M-B searches the next occurrence backward. If you want
those keystrokes to do what they did before version 8.0, add the fol‐
lowing lines at the end of your nanorc file:
bind ^F forward main
bind ^B back main
bind M-F formatter main
bind M-B linter main