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 :

1. Nano Upgrade Process for OS X
2. Nano Syntax Highlighting nanorc Project

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

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 :

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 :

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 :