Quick Editing with GNU Nano - Linux and Open Source Screencasts

#7 Quick Editing with GNU Nano

GNU Nano is one of my favorite "little" text editors. While Nano is small, it does support some fairly advanced features like syntax highlighting, killing and yanking (copy and pasting), buffer support (think tabs), spell checking, and others.

In this episode we'll configure a good initial Nano setup, show how to navigate around Nano, and go over how to use some of the advanced - not enabled by default - features.

Keep in mind, when I mention the key "meta" this is also known as the "option" key in the Apple world and "ALT" in the Windows world. That is the key I am referring to.

As I recommend in in the screencast, swapping your CAPS and CTRL keys will help quite a bit while using GNU Nano. Consult episode 2 to find out how.

Macroron provided updated instructions to get spell checking working on Fedora 11

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# ~/.nanorc
# use auto indentation
set autoindent

# use multiple buffers
set multibuffer

# set tab size
set tabsize 4

# include ruby syntax highlighting
include /usr/share/nano/ruby.nanorc

# include html syntax highlighting
include /usr/share/nano/html.nanorc

# include nanorc sytax highlighting
include /usr/share/nano/nanorc.nanorc

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out the newest Technicast on Apache2. All purchases support FOSSCasts.

Add Comment

1. Maj on Oct 19, 2009

Did you notice the content of your blog only occupies about a quarter of the page horizontally?

2. John Yerhot on Oct 20, 2009

@Maj Thanks for the comment - yes, I designed the site to have a static width of 550 pixels, so that may seem really small if you're on a high resolution monitor. I've tested the site against all the popular browsers and the only one I know of having any issues is IE 5.5. However, if you think it's a rendering issue, let me know what browser/platform you're on and I'll get it fixed. Thanks!

3. Steve Stonebraker on Dec 22, 2009

thanks man, i looked around for ruby syntax highlighting in nano for a while, i'm glad i found this

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#7 Quick Editing with GNU Nano

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