The nano text editor

I use nano in preference to vim. I’ve used nano for casual file editing for years but never learned it fully. Since I migrated my blog to Nikola I’m using nano more frequently as I typically write my blog posts on a remote shell, so I thought I’d learn nano a little more.

Keybindings

I used the sites below to discover some of the essential keyboard shortcuts. I should have done this long ago, it didn’t take long.

• http://mintaka.sdsu.edu/reu/nano.html
• http://www.tuxradar.com/content/text-editing-nano-made-easy
• http://www.cheatography.com/davechild/content/nano-shortcuts/

Syntax Highlighting

However, the killer feature for nano is the Syntax Highlighting provided by Craig Barnes. He uses mixins to ensure a consistent colour theme for all the language highlighters. I don’t use his custom key bindings however, it gets confusing when connecting to different hosts taht have a default nano configuration.

• https://github.com/craigbarnes/nanorc