gnu-nano-quick-reference.md

GNU nano Quick Reference

GNU nano is a lightweight text editor that emulates look and feel of the legendary Pico editor. Although GNU nano undoubtedly cannot compete with complexity and flexibility of Vim or Emacs, it is powerful enough to become first choice of sysadmins and a default editor in several Linux distributions, including Raspbian.

Keyboard shortcuts

Nano does not provide any menus, so you need to memorize a couple of keyboard combinations to use it. Two lines at the bottom serve as contextual help that shows you the important keyboard shortcuts. Note that they are written in UNIX notation (e.g. ^X translates to Ctrl-X). Following table summarizes the most important of them:

Keystroke	Function	Description
Ctrl-G	Get help	Help
Ctrl-X	Exit	Save file and exit
Ctrl-O	Write Out	Save file as
Ctrl-W	Where Is	Search
Alt-W	WhereIs Next	Search next
Alt-R	Replace	Search and replace
Ctrl-K	Cut	Cut line(s) / Cut selection
Ctrl-U	UnCut	Paste line(s) / Paste selection
Ctrl-^	Set mark	Start selection
Alt-^	Copy	Copy text of the selection
Alt-G	Go To Line	Move to given position
Ctrl-R	Open new buffer	Open another file
Alt->	Next buffer	Switch opened files forward
Alt-<	Previous buffer	Switch opened files backward

The last two keystrokes are actually Alt-. and Alt-,. There is no need to hold Shift. The same applies to shortcuts Ctrl-^ and Alt-^ for selecting and copying text. Vast majority of people press Ctrl-6 and Alt-6 instead.

It's generally a good idea to tweak the global configuration file a little bit:

$ sudo nano /etc/nanorc

I recommend to enable following options. Note that in case of set tabsize option I prefer to change tab size 4 instead of default 8.

## Use auto-indentation.
set autoindent

## Backup files to filename~.
set backup

## Do case sensitive searches by default.
set casesensitive

## Constantly display the cursor position in the statusbar.  Note that
## this overrides "quickblank".
set const

## Use the blank line below the titlebar as extra editing space.
set morespace

## Allow multiple file buffers (inserting a file will put it into a
## separate buffer).  You must have configured with --enable-multibuffer
## for this to work.
##
set multibuffer

## Make the Home key smarter.  When Home is pressed anywhere but at the
## very beginning of non-whitespace characters on a line, the cursor
## will jump to that beginning (either forwards or backwards).  If the
## cursor is already at that position, it will jump to the true
## beginning of the line.
# set smarthome

## Use smooth scrolling as the default.
set smooth

## Use this tab size instead of the default; it must be greater than 0.
set tabsize 4

## Convert typed tabs to spaces.
set tabstospaces

## Enable the new (EXPERIMENTAL) generic undo code, not just for line cuts
set undo

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