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Customize Nano Text Editor (2022)

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Re: Customize Nano Text Editor (2022)

#51

Post by skydhash »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #31

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.

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.

Re: Customize Nano Text Editor (2022)

#52

Post by bombcar »

gorgoiler wrote: post #39

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 alp…

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”.

Re: Customize Nano Text Editor (2022)

#53

Post by positron26 »

kstrauser wrote: post #35
positron26 wrote: post #17

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…

Which bindings changed?

bind ^F forward main

bind ^B back main

bind M-f nextword main

bind M-b prevword main

Re: Customize Nano Text Editor (2022)

#55

Post by 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?

Re: Customize Nano Text Editor (2022)

#56

Post by ssivark »

tpoacher wrote: post #18
its_notjack wrote: post #4

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/

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…

Interesting. Since this kind of scriptable customization sounds like bread & butter emacs -- what tips the scales towards nano, for you?

Re: Customize Nano Text Editor (2022)

#57

Post by jval43 »

digisign wrote: post #19
its_notjack wrote: post #4

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/

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.

I knew it! A junior dev recently used CTRL-S in nano and I couldn't believe that it actually worked.

They told me it had always been this way and I felt stupid for a bit. Good to know it's a recent addition.

Re: Customize Nano Text Editor (2022)

#60

Post by Firehawke »

bombcar wrote: post #52
gorgoiler wrote: post #39

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 alp…

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”.

Same. My first internet access was a BSD shell account back in 1993; I had Pine and Pico on there. Coming from a world of MS-DOS BBSes (I ran one myself!) it wasn't that hard to take QEdit skills and move that over to using Pine and Pico-- it was quite comfortable.

I still tend to muscle memory my way through using Nano when I need to do quick file edits on Linux.

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