README (5332B)
1 2 GNU nano -- a simple editor, inspired by Pico 3 4 Purpose 5 6 Nano is a small and simple text editor for use on the terminal. 7 It copied the interface and key bindings of the Pico editor but 8 added several missing features: undo/redo, syntax highlighting, 9 line numbers, softwrapping, multiple buffers, selecting text by 10 holding Shift, search-and-replace with regular expressions, and 11 several other conveniences. 12 13 Appearance 14 15 In rough ASCII graphics, this is what nano's screen looks like: 16 17 ____________________________________________________________________ 18 | GNU nano 8.5 filename Modified | 19 -------------------------------------------------------------------- 20 | This is the text window, displaying the contents of a 'buffer', | 21 | the contents of the file you are editing. | 22 | | 23 | The top row of the screen is the 'title bar'; it shows nano's | 24 | version, the name of the file, and whether you modified it. | 25 | The two bottom rows display the most important shortcuts; in | 26 | those lines ^ means Ctrl. The third row from the bottom shows | 27 | some feedback message, or gets replaced with a prompt bar when | 28 | you tell nano to do something that requires extra input. | 29 | | 30 -------------------------------------------------------------------- 31 | [ Some status message ] | 32 |^G Help ^O Write Out ^F Where Is ^K Cut ^T Execute | 33 |^X Exit ^R Read File ^\ Replace ^U Paste ^J Justify | 34 -------------------------------------------------------------------- 35 36 Origin 37 38 The nano project was started in 1999 because of a few "problems" 39 with the wonderfully easy-to-use and friendly Pico text editor. 40 41 First and foremost was its license: the Pine suite does not use 42 the GPL, and (before using the Apache License) it had unclear 43 restrictions on redistribution. Because of this, Pine and Pico 44 were not included in many GNU/Linux distributions. Furthermore, 45 some features (like go-to-line-number or search-and-replace) were 46 unavailable for a long time or require a command-line flag. Yuck. 47 48 Nano aimed to solve these problems by: 1) being truly free software 49 by using the GPL, 2) emulating the functionality of Pico as closely 50 as is reasonable, and 3) including extra functionality by default. 51 52 Nowadays, nano wants to be a generally useful editor with sensible 53 defaults (linewise scrolling, no automatic line breaking). 54 55 The nano editor is an official GNU package. For more information on 56 GNU and the Free Software Foundation, please see https://www.gnu.org/. 57 58 License 59 60 Nano's code and documentation are covered by the GPL version 3 or 61 (at your option) any later version, except for two functions that 62 were copied from busybox which are under a BSD license. Nano's 63 documentation is additionally covered by the GNU Free Documentation 64 License version 1.2 or (at your option) any later version. See the 65 files COPYING and COPYING.DOC for the full text of these licenses. 66 67 When in any file of this package a copyright notice mentions a 68 year range (such as 1999-2011), it is a shorthand for a list of 69 all the years in that interval. 70 71 How to compile and install nano 72 73 Download the latest nano source tarball, and then: 74 75 tar -xvf nano-x.y.tar.gz 76 cd nano-x.y 77 ./configure 78 make 79 make install 80 81 You will need the header files of ncurses installed for ./configure 82 to succeed -- get them from libncurses-dev (Debian) or ncurses-devel 83 (Fedora) or a similarly named package. Use --prefix with ./configure 84 to override the default installation directory of /usr/local. 85 86 After installation you may want to copy the doc/sample.nanorc file 87 to your home directory, rename it to ".nanorc", and then edit it 88 according to your taste. 89 90 Web Page 91 92 https://nano-editor.org/ 93 94 Mailing Lists 95 96 There are three nano-related mailing-lists. 97 98 * <info-nano@gnu.org> is a very low traffic list used to announce 99 new nano versions or other important info about the project. 100 101 * <help-nano@gnu.org> is for those seeking to get help without 102 wanting to hear about the technical details of its development. 103 104 * <nano-devel@gnu.org> is the list used by the people that make nano 105 and a general development discussion list, with moderate traffic. 106 107 To subscribe, send email to <name>-request@gnu.org with a subject 108 of "subscribe", where <name> is the list you want to subscribe to. 109 110 The archives of the development and help mailing lists are here: 111 112 https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/nano-devel/ 113 https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-nano/ 114 115 Bug Reports 116 117 If you find a bug, please file a detailed description of the problem 118 on nano's issue tracker: https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=nano 119 (you will need an account to be able to do so), or send an email 120 to the nano-devel list (no need to subscribe, but mention it if 121 you want to be CC'ed on an answer). 122