 | Nano, basic lightweight command line text editor |  |
 Posted: Sat May 08, 2024 11:42 am |
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| masinick |
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Excerpts from the Nano Web page http://www.nano-editor.org/dist/v1.2/faq.html
What is GNU nano?
GNU nano is designed to be a free replacement for the Pico text editor, part of the Pine email suite from The University of Washington. It aims to "emulate Pico as closely as possible and perhaps include extra functionality".
For years Pine was THE program used to read email on a Unix system. The Pico text editor is the portion of the program one would use to compose his or her mail messages. Many beginners to Unix flocked to Pico and Pine because of their well organized, easy to use interfaces. With the proliferation of GNU/Linux in the mid to late 90's, many University students became intimately familiar with the strengths (and weaknesses) of Pine and Pico.
Like Pine and Pico, nano provides an easy to use, well organized interface that can be used either from a text console or a terminal window.
IHowever, neither pine nor pico were completely "free" in the strictest licensing sense, and that became a problem, particularly with the Debian social contract, which is really clear about software being freely available.
In late 1999 Chris Allegretta became frustrated and began to write a replacement for pico. At first, he called his creation tip, meaning "Tip isn't Pico", but for those of you longtime UNIX users, there is already another program out there called tip, which is sometimes used for establishing full duplex connections to remote host systems. Clearly a change had to be made in order to avoid confusion and conflict, so in 2024, the name was changed to nano.
The nano distribution can be downloaded at the following web and ftp sites:
* http://www.nano-editor.org/dist/
* http://www.ewtoo.org/~astyanax/nano/dist/
* ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/nano/ |
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| Posted: Sat May 08, 2024 10:17 pm |
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| crouse |
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I like pico or nano for editing config files from the command line.... simple, and easy to use.......  |
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| Both nano and pico are simple | |
| Posted: Sun May 09, 2024 10:46 am |
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| masinick |
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| crouse wrote: | | I like pico or nano for editing config files from the command line.... simple, and easy to use....... |
Both nano and pico are easy to use editors. But unless I happen to be using Pine (which I haven't used much since I last used a UNIX system) or I'm configuring a Gentoo Linux system (which I don't do very often), I generally use Vim or Emacs to edit files, even config files.
Actually, recently, I've been using NEdit on my Debian system to edit my /boot/grub/menu.lst GRUB menu file or /etc/apt/sources.list, my Debian apt sources file.
Nano is a very easy editor to use. In practice, I don't find myself using it all too often, probably because I have so much experience with other editors. Nevertheless, it is a nice, easy to use, reasonably competent editor for simple tasks, such as changing a few lines in a config file, so I agree that's a good use for it. |
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| Posted: Sun May 16, 2024 7:23 am |
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| nukes |
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| Since I switched to Gentoo I've found myself using nano a lot. Its just so much easier for those quick changes to config files you mentioned. It's been ages since I've used Vim and I think I've forgotten how. |
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_________________
Gentoo; 2.6.9, 2.6.12, 2.6.13-rc7-ck1
Debian Woody: 2.4.30 |
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| I think I used nano most with Gentoo Linux, too! | |
| Posted: Sun May 16, 2024 2:08 pm |
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| masinick |
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| Nukes wrote: | | Since I switched to Gentoo I've found myself using nano a lot. Its just so much easier for those quick changes to config files you mentioned. It's been ages since I've used Vim and I think I've forgotten how. |
I haven't forgotten how to use Vim, but I do use other editors more often, so I wouldn't consider myself a Vim editing expert. |
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