Customize Nano Text Editor (2022)

[its_notjack]

I must have used nano for years at this point, and I'm shocked to find out how customisable nano actually is! I tend to use micro[0] on most of my systems now just because it comes with really lovely defaults and keybindings that are a bit more familiar, but this might make me take a second look at nano in future.

[0] https://micro-editor.github.io/

[tpoacher]

It's not just customisable, it's also insanely scriptable. Any action that you can do in nano itself corresponds to a command, and you can create "string macros" that you can bind to key combinations. Additionally it can execute external commands on any nano buffer and return the result. Combining the two is very powerful.

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).

[digisign]

Before I used micro & ne I used nano, and configured the keybindings to work in the CUA style. I still have the dot files, didn't delete them, but they rarely get used anymore.

I think they recently added Ctrl+S to save by default, even if unconfigured, woohoo.

[flkiwi]

Same same. Never even occurred to me to look. That's the risk of a (successful) low-friction product though: you use it in quick bursts where the tool is necessary but largely invisible, and you never invest in learning more about it because it works so well with the defaults. There's probably a profound strategic insight buried in there somewhere.

[chawyehsu]

It seems few people are aware of how customizable nano actually is. Usually, they use nano with the default preset for quick bootstrapping tasks and then switch to vim without hesitation. While vim/neovim are certainly very powerful, nano remains my go-to editor for many quick terminal operations. I've customized it quite a bit[1], especially the key bindings, though the defaults are already excellent.

[1]: https://github.com/chawyehsu/dotfiles/blob/main/.config/nano...

[davidcollantes]

I would dearly love it if you could comment a little bit more that nanorc. I am going to “steal” some of it, for sure. Thank you much for sharing it!

[p4bl0]

I tried a long time ago [1,2] to initiate this discussion on Nano here. I'm glad it's happening :).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41289141

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41289773

[sanex]

Nano is my go-to whenever doing something quick in the terminal. It's quick, I don't need to learn how to use it, and now it's going to be slightly more convenient. I had no idea it had these options. Thank you!

[bigstrat2003]

Nano is by far the best terminal editor imo. The only situation where I'm using a terminal editor is when I'm ssh'ed into a server, and I need to quick edit a file (for serious code writing a GUI editor is far more capable). Nano is ideal for that use case: you get in, it tells you what all the relevant keybinds are right on the screen, and you get out without any fuss.

[gorgoiler]

Nano is quite a venerable piece of software with the initial implementation shipping as pico, the text editor for the pine mail client, back in 1992. Tens of thousands of students at a few universities will have been introduced to it as their very first email client.

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.

[bombcar]

This is exactly my path to it, and even though I know how to “eat flaming death” vi and used emacs for awhile, nano is still my default “edit that config file quickly”.

[iLoveOncall]

If you're on Mac and can't get .nanorc to work, check out https://stackoverflow.com/a/73373788/3876196

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.

[positron26]

Right after the nano maintainer got bullied out by the FSF, I noticed two bindings got their defaults changed. They never change. I almost feel like it was graffiti, a flex against the old maintainer, a retribution for not doing whatever the FSF wanted.

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)?

[kstrauser]

Which bindings changed?

[jasperry]

The line numbers and position bar are some real quality-of-life enhancements!

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.

[mystifyingpoi]

> physics major friends in college thinking it was pure snobbery for vi

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.

[ziotom78]

Absolutely, the shortcut help is so useful!

I believe that Nano and Pico copied it from Wordstar.

[thejbo]

I actually prefer 'constantshow' instead of 'linenumbers'. That way if you want to select/copy some text from the terminal it doesn't include those line numbers.

[notepad0x90]

My struggle is that I work on lots of systems, sometimes ephemeral/temporary systems. There is no easy way to "sync" customizations, so I adapt to defaults.

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.

[mikkupikku]

I use a very customized emacs/evil setup, and before that a very customized vim/neovim setup, but I've never had trouble jumping onto systems where only plain Jane vi is available. I think it's because of the color scheme, or lack thereof, that I don't have any problem automatically switching. If I don't see my color scheme, by fingers just automatically use vi compatible bindings and I don't find myself expecting my other customizations to be present.

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.)

[tom_]

Cloning a github repo to ~/.emacs.d is how you can cart around your Emacs config. I've been doing this for years, and it works nicely. For things configured by files that live in the home folder directly (e.g., shell - and looks like Nano would be similar?), I've got another repo with a couple of install scripts that create symlinks to the version-controlled files. I don't love the extra steps, but I've found this works pretty well too.

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.

[wahlis]

Check out Chezmoi (https://chezmoi.io). They even offer a nice comparison table for alternatives.

[skydhash]

I don't really sync my config. I just scp or wget files when I need them. I have some config as gists, as snippets in my notes, as public files in a webserver under a subdomain.

[qsort]

https://www.nano-editor.org/dist/latest/nanorc.5.html

[blakesterz]

They also have a nice cheat sheet there: https://nano-editor.org/cheatsheet.html

[SilentM68]

Thank you, looking for way to set tab to 2 spaces for eons without success! Very helpful :)

[dv35z]

What would it take to have "vim-wiki" for nano (see also: FOAM, Obsidian)? I have always admired nano for how simple and easy to use it is, and would love to use it for wiki/obsidian-style note taking & linking...

[gh02t]

Nano doesn't really support any sort of scripting or plugins beyond macro sequences AFAIK. So, not really in the same sense as something like vim-wiki etc. You might be able to cobble together something with shell scripts and text files, but it won't be well integrated.

[jdorfman]

I’ve been using nano as my default bash profile editor for over 15 years. It’s also great for quick updates for other config files.

Definitely going to enable mouse support. Didn’t know that was possible.

[Narishma]

Is it possible to apply some of the settings like autoindent or line numbers only when editing source code? In other words, does it have different modes like emacs?

[pantalaimon]

A lot of those are also command line options, so you can just make an alias.

[tracker1]

Also worth a look, if you want more TUI..

https://github.com/microsoft/edit

[spidermonkey23]

I just did this for some of my setups recently, using the minibar and constantshow settings.easy to cut and paste without line numbers enabled too

[kapitanjakc]

10 years, I've been using nano as my editor.

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.

[nyc111]

I use nano a lot but this page is not opening for me. Is someone else having the same problem?

[nyc111]

I was able to open it in archive

[DoctorOetker]

any sane advice on

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?

[reaperducer]

Note that for the last few versions of macOS, "nano" is symlinked to pico.

[haik90]

nano is my go-to text editor, because it’s the default text editor for all our systems, but somehow I never customize it, until this post.

[threatofrain]

What about LSP?

[akatsutki]

better than vim

[bilekas]

Don't quite agree, it's simply a different tool, that's like saying notepad is better than vscode. They're both different purpose builds.

[SilentM68]

I would say that every tool has its good and bad.

A tool is only as good as its ease of use and clarity of its documentation, imho.

[qsort]

no

[Ekaros]

Did you know Nano supports mouse? Alt+M... Not that I use that much, but it is fun fact.

[p4bl0]

This is the very first item in the linked blog post.