GNU nano -- a simple editor, inspired by Pico 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, and (before using the Apache License) it had unclear restrictions on redistribution. Because of this, Pine and Pico were not included in many GNU/Linux distributions. Furthermore, some features (like go-to-line-number or search-and-replace) were unavailable for a long time or require a command-line flag. Yuck. Nano aimed to solve these problems by: 1) being truly free software by using the GPL, 2) emulating the functionality of Pico as closely as is reasonable, and 3) including extra functionality by default. Nowadays, nano wants to be a generally useful editor with sensible defaults (linewise scrolling, no automatic line breaking). The nano editor is an official GNU package. For more information on GNU and the Free Software Foundation, please see https://www.gnu.org/. How to compile and install nano Download the latest nano source tarball, and then: tar -xvf nano-x.y.tar.gz cd nano-x.y ./configure make make install You will need the header files of ncurses installed for ./configure to succeed -- get them from libncurses-dev (Debian) or ncurses-devel (Fedora) or a similarly named package. Use --prefix with ./configure to override the default installation directory of /usr/local. 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.