nano

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Downloading nano
• Compiling nano
• Documentation

Introduction

This page describes GNU nano, a small and friendly text editor. Nano is a clone of the Pico text editor covered under the GNU General Public License. Besides basic emulation, nano also has the following other features:

• GNU autoconf support.
• Goto line and replace functions (without needing command-line flags).
• Interactive replace function and spell checker.
• Auto-indent support.
• Slang curses-wrapper support.
• Variable displayed tab width.
• Regular expression search and replace.
• Toggles for command-line flags from within the editor.

Downloading nano

GNU nano can be found on http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/nano/ or the older nano FTP site at ftp://ftp.nano-editor.org.

Compiling nano

To compile nano you will need a curses library. Ncurses is highly recommended, but nano may work with other Ncurses-compatible libraries. You may also wish to install GNU gettext if you wish to use nano in languages other than the default (English). Most modern GNU/Linux distributions install these programs by default so there should not be a need to download them separately.

Documentation

• The GNU nano Online Manual is available at /software/nano/manual/
• There are also several other documents you might find helpful, the nano FAQ and the Current list of bugs.
• Finally there is the nano editor homepage which contains some information not contained here.

Return to GNU's home page.

Please send FSF & GNU inquiries & questions to gnu@gnu.org. There are also other ways to contact the FSF.

Please send comments on these web pages to webmasters@gnu.org, send other questions to gnu@gnu.org.

Copyright (C) 2001 Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111, USA

Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.

Updated: 9 Jan 2001 mhw