Nano has already supplanted the great EMacs and Vim as the most popular text editor of all linux distros, for though it has many omissions in functionality it scores over the older, more complete programs in two important respects. First, it is slightly simpler; and secondly it has the text "^ Exit" inscribed in highlighted text on its footer

EDIT : This sees to be going over some people's heads. It's a hitchiker's guide to the galaxy reference.

The Hitchhiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions . . . it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.

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[–] esc@piefed.social 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Both nano and emacs suffer from the same problem - bad defaults. You need to pass like ten options to nano for it to work as expected to edit configuration files and small scripts.

[–] daychilde@lemmy.world 1 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

I haven't bothered to poke it deeply. What options do you use please? I'll give it a go. :)

[–] esc@piefed.social 3 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

alias nano='nano -A -D -E -F -T 4 -Z -g -i -l -m -q -t -% -_' and you need to enable syntax highlighting in nanorc (not all distros enable it by default) include /usr/share/nano/*.nanorc also there are additional/improved rules for highlighting here https://github.com/galenguyer/nano-syntax-highlighting and you can rebind every key, but it seems that it doesn't support 'chaining' of keys nor multiple modifier keys at the same time.

[–] daychilde@lemmy.world 3 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Nice, thanks!

For anyone wondering about the options: https://i.imgur.com/hAjTxJO.png

Also, apparently you can create ~/.nanorc and put the following in for those (instead of an alias):

set smarthome
set boldtext
set tabstospaces
set multibuffer
set tabsize 4
set zap
set showcursor
set autoindent
set linenumbers
set mouse
set indicator
set saveonexit
set stateflags
set minibar

I'll play around with those and the syntax stuff. I definitely personally do not want the saveonexit behaviour, but you've started me on the path of looking at the other options, and that right there shows me it's worth my time to look, so thank you :)

[–] caden@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 11 hours ago

That set of options sounds basically like micro's behavior by default...