GNU nano -- an enhanced clone of the Pico text editor Overview The nano project was started because of a few "problems" with the wonderfully easy-to-use and friendly Pico text editor. First and foremost was its license: the Pine suite does not use the GPL or a GPL-friendly license, and has unclear restrictions on redistribution. Because of this, Pine and Pico are not included with many GNU/Linux distributions. Also, other features (like go-to-line-number or search-and-replace) were unavailable until recently or require a command-line flag. Yuck. nano aims to solve these problems by emulating the functionality of Pico as closely as possible while addressing the problems above and providing other extra functionality. The nano editor is an official GNU package. For more information on GNU and the Free Software Foundation, please see http://www.gnu.org/. How to compile and install nano Download the nano source code, then: tar xvzf nano-x.y.z.tar.gz cd nano-x.y.z ./configure make make install It's that simple. Use --prefix with configure to override the default installation directory of /usr/local. If you haven't configured with the --disable-nanorc option, after installation you may want to copy the doc/sample.nanorc file to your home directory, rename it to ".nanorc", and then edit it according to your taste. Web Page https://nano-editor.org/ Mailing Lists There are three nano-related mailing-lists. + info-nano@gnu.org is a very low traffic list used to announce new nano versions or other important info about the project. + help-nano@gnu.org is for those seeking to get help without wanting to hear about the technical details of its development. + nano-devel@gnu.org is the list used by the people that make nano and a general development discussion list, with moderate traffic. To subscribe, send email to <name>-request@gnu.org with a subject of "subscribe", where <name> is the list you want to subscribe to. Bug Reports To report a bug, please file a description of the problem on nano's bug tracker (https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=nano -- hover on "Bugs", then click "Submit new"). The issue may have already been reported, so please look first. Current Status Since version 2.5.0, GNU nano has abandoned the distinction between a stable and a development branch: it is now on a "rolling" release -- fixing bugs and adding new features go hand in hand. Copyright Years When in any file of this package a copyright notice mentions a year range (such as 1999-2011), it is a shorthand for a list of all the years in that interval.
Benno Schulenberg
authored
And reword them too, so that it is clearer what the mechanism is for determining which syntax to use for a file.