71 lines
5.3 KiB
Markdown
71 lines
5.3 KiB
Markdown
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---
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title: "GNU nano is my editor of choice"
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date: "2021-08-13"
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---
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I have been using GNU nano for the overwhelming majority of my life. Like an old friend, `nano` has always been reliable and has never failed me where other text editors have. By far, it has been the most influential software I have ever used regarding how I approach the design of my own software.
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## The `vim` vs `emacs` flame war
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I've used both `vim` and `emacs`. I don't like either of them, for differing reasons: modal editing doesn't really fit my mental model of how an editor should work, and Emacs Lisp is not really a particularly fun language to use simply for customizing the behavior of an editor -- as they say, Emacs is a nice operating system, it just needs a good editor.
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In all cases, I think `nano` is a much better editor (at least for me), as when properly configured (and previously with some patching), it provides all of the features from `vim` I would want anyway, but in a modeless format.
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## A note about `pico`
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As most people know, GNU nano began its life as a clone of UW pico. Pico (short for PIne COmposer) was bundled with the PINE email client, which was written by the University of Washington. Unfortunately, PINE was distributed under a custom license which had many problems. This was eventually solved when the University of Washington released ALPINE (short for Alternatively Licensed PINE) under the Apache 2.0 license.
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The licensing problem in combination with a desire to make a more capable editor based on the overall `pico` user experience led to the creation of GNU nano.
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In the Alpine Linux distribution, both `pico` and `nano` are available. Here's what `pico` looks like by default:
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## The default `nano` experience
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Like with `pico`, the default UI for `nano` is quite boring to look at. Here is GNU nano displaying the same file with the default configuration:
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As you can hopefully see, the default `nano` configuration is quite similar to that of `pico`. However, unlike `pico`, it can be changed by editing the `~/.nanorc` file.
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## Building something like `vim` using `.nanorc`
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What I want in an editor is something that basically looks like `vim`, but is modeless like `nano`. Something like this:
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But how do we get there? The answer is simple: we use the `~/.nanorc` file.
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As a result of many people wanting the same thing: `vim`\-like functionality with modeless editing, `nano` gained several third-party patches which allowed for this. For the most part, these patches (or equivalent functionality) have been included upstream in recent years.
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Getting most of the way to a vim-like look and feel, without syntax highlighting, is quite simple. You simply need to add these lines to your `~/.nanorc` file with any recent version of `nano`:
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\# enables the minibar feature
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set minibar
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# disables the shortcut hints
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set nohelp
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That gets you something like this:
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However, that minibar looks a little ugly with the inverse text. The good news is, we can disable the inverse text by adding another snippet to `~/.nanorc`:
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\# disable inverse text for the minibar
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set titlecolor normal,normal
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The way this works is by setting the foreground and background colors for the titlebar to `normal`, which means that `nano` shouldn't change whatever color is already set. That gives us:
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## Enabling syntax highlighting
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There are two ways that syntax highlighting can be enabled in `nano`: both come down to including configuration snippets to enable it. GNU nano comes with some sample syntax highlighting configuration, which on Alpine systems is available in the `nano-syntax` package, but I don't personally use it, as the color scheme is quite ugly.
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Instead, I use an improved [syntax highlighting package that is distributed on GitHub](https://github.com/scopatz/nanorc). To install it, you can just do something like:
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nanabozho:~$ git clone git@github.com:scopatz/nanorc ~/.nano/
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\[...\]
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This will install the syntax highlighting package to `~/.nano`. At that point, you just add `include` lines for the syntax highlighters you want to enable:
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include "~/.nano/c.nanorc"
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Once you do that, you're done and left with a nano that looks like this:
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Hopefully this post demonstrates that `nano` is a quite capable editor in its own right.
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