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nano text editor hacks

written by Eric J. Ma on 2017-09-11 | tags: programming nano text editor coding snippets

Much as I've embraced the Atom text editor, there are times when the GUI isn't accessible to us, and we are forced to use a Terminal-based text editor.

Now, I'm not one of those crazy types who use emacs or vim - those are the real seasoned pros. (I still don't know how to exit vim, btw.) As such, my terminal editor of choice remains the venerable nano. Here's some hacks that I recently figured out, to make text editing much easier in nano.

(1) Syntax highlighting

This is such a big one! Syntax highlighting seriously helps a ton. If you're on a Mac, make sure you install homebrew's version of nano - you can look at my dotfiles or run the command:

$ brew install nano

Then, edit your ~/.nanorc file to look something like this:

include /usr/local/share/nano/python.nanorc  # gives you Python syntax highlighting
include /usr/local/share/nano/sh.nanorc  # gives you bash shell syntax highlighting

Next time you use nano (from your user account), syntax highlighting should be enabled!

You can find a sample .nanorc file on my GitHub dotfiles repository

(2) Keyboard Shortcuts

Here's a laundry list of keyboard shortcuts I've muscle-memorized:

  • Ctrl-x: quits. There will be a prompt to save the file if it's been modified.
    • I usually end up doing Ctrl-x-y-Enter.
  • Ctrl-v scrolls down a page
  • Ctrl-y scrolls up a page
  • Ctrl-w searches the document for a term that you type in (think "where")
  • Ctrl-k cuts the line
  • Ctrl-u pastes a cut line
  • Ctrl-^ (i.e. Ctrl-Shift-6 on macOS keyboards) starts a "select" cursor.
    • You can use arrow keys to expand or shrink the selection, which can then be cut and pasted.
  • Ctrl-c cancels any commands that are 'active'.
  • Ctrl-o activates the "save file" dialogue - lets you save your state without quitting.

(3) Persistence

nano, being not as fancy as vim or emacs, means it doesn't have the concept of sessions. Doesn't matter - use tmux to persist!

All-in-all, the biggest one that aids in writing on a terminal editor is syntax highlighting. I wrote this blog post in nano, and being able to visually see different parts of my text highlighted according to their meaning has made writing much easier.
Cite this blog post: 
@article{
    ericmjl-2017-nano-hacks,
    author = {Eric J. Ma},
    title = {nano text editor hacks},
    year = {2017},
    month = {09},
    day = {11},
    howpublished = {\url{https://ericmjl.github.io}},
    journal = {Eric J. Ma's Blog},
    url = {https://ericmjl.github.io/blog/2017/9/11/nano-text-editor-hacks},
}

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