Nano basics

GNU nano was designed as a free replacement for the Pico text editor, which was part of the University of Washington’s Pine email suite.

At the end of 1999, Chris Allegretta left Slackware for Debian. He missed having a package that included Pine and Pico. So, he decided to make a Pico clone, at that time called Tip Isn’t Pico (TIP).

In January 2000, TIP was renamed nano due to a conflict with another program called tip, included with many older Unix systems.

In February 2001, nano received an official GNU declaration from Richard Stallman. nano also reached its first production release on March 22, 2001.

To create a new file, as a non-root user, run the nano command from the terminal:

$ nano

Figure 7.24 – Nano text editor

At the bottom taskbar of the window, there are help commands for the editor:

Figure 7.25 – Help commands for nano

Unlike emacs, nano denotes the Ctrl...