Nano Text Editor Tips & Tricks

Abhishek Ghosh

By Abhishek Ghosh February 25, 2015 5:54 pm Updated on February 25, 2015

Nano Text Editor Tips & Tricks

Here Are Some Tips & Tricks for (Mac) OS X and GNU/Linux Nano Text Editor Including Shortcuts, Line Numbers, Going to Line Number etc. Basic Things. vi is definitely a powerful text editor, you can read How to Use vi Text Editor, but basically for the new Linux and OS X user, Nano appears better. It is better to help the user to shift from closed source software like Microsoft Windows in a smooth way. When Nano’s limitations will push them to use vi, they’ll definitely use vi. A human trying to ssh for the first time in life, if we instruct them to use vi, only the difficulty of using a text editor becomes the reason to fear ssh, honestly, that is not exactly what is called Free Software agonistic approach. These Nano Text Editor Tips & Tricks are possibly not for 100% new user, but can help many users in real life.

Nano Text Editor Tips & Tricks : OS X and Syntax Highlighting

We love Syntax Highlighting. Only for Nano, we have some useful guides and projects :

We are not mentioning more guides related to Syntax Highlighting for Nano. You can perform a search on this website later, if you want.

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Nano Text Editor Tips & Tricks

These are the parameters which you can define in ~./nanorc file, most can be understood from the name. Use one by one. Do not copy paste the whole file. You’ll need to run source ~./nanorc after each changes :

# Turn on auto-indent 
set autoindent
# Turn on the creation of backup files
set backup
set backupdir "/path/to/backups"
set mouse
set multibuffer
set casesensitive
set noconvert
set nofollow
# Turn off the Help
set nohelp
set historylog
set view
set nowrap
set regexp
set smooth
set speller aspell
set tabsize 10
set tabstospaces
set tempfile
set fill 72

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# Turn on auto-indent

set autoindent

# Turn on the creation of backup files

set backup

set backupdir "/path/to/backups"

set mouse

set multibuffer

set casesensitive

set noconvert

set nofollow

# Turn off the Help

set nohelp

set historylog

set view

set nowrap

set regexp

set smooth

set speller aspell

set tabsize 10

set tabstospaces

set tempfile

set fill 72

unset does opposite action versus set. It forces to change the default behavior. Everyone knows the Mac keyboard shortcuts, yet if you press control + G on Mac or ctrl + G on other keyboards, you’ll get all the shortcuts. You will get many great stuffs here than any blog websites :

http://www.nano-editor.org/docs.php

One thing, quite commonly we need to use is – going to Line number AB. For example, you ran :

nginx -t

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nginx -t

You might get error in configtest with line number 80. In that case, you can open the file with cursor on the line in this way :

nano +80 /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

1	nano +80 /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

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Nano Text Editor Tips & Tricks

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