nano - a GPLed, enhanced clone of the Pico text editor.
Overview
The nano project was started because of a few "problems" with the
wonderfully easy-to-use and friendly Pico text editor.
First and foremost is its license: the Pine suite does not use the
GPL or a GPL-friendly license, and has unclear restrictions on
redistribution. Because of this, Pine and Pico are not included with
many GNU/Linux distributions. Also, other features (like goto line
number or search and replace) were unavailable until recently or
require a command-line flag. Yuck.
nano aims to solve these problems by emulating the functionality of
Pico as closely as possible while adressing the problems above and
perhaps providing other extra functionality.
How to compile and install nano
Download the nano source code, then:
tar zxvf nano-x.y.z.tar.gz
cd nano-x.y.z
./configure
make
make install
It's that simple. Use --prefix to override the default installation
directory of /usr/local.
Web Page
http://www.nano-editor.org
Mailing List and Bug Reports
SourceForge hosts all the nano-related mailing-lists.
+ nano-announce@lists.sourceforge.net is a very low traffic list
used to announce new Nano versions or other important information
about the project.
+ nano-devel@lists.sourceforge.net is the list used by the people
that make Nano and a general development discussion list, with
moderate traffic.
To subscribe, send email to nano-<name>-request@lists.sourceforge.net
with a subject of "subscribe", where <name> is the list you want to
subscribe to.
For general bug reports, send a description of the problem to
nano@nano-editor.org or directly to the development list.
Current Status
nano is currently at version 0.9.x, and it will probably remain there
for awhile. This reflects the adage that the last 10% of a project
takes 90% of the time. Version 1.0 will be released when there are
no unresolved bugs, and not before. I am also currently looking for
patches for all things listed in the TODO file. If you have a
comment or suggestion, please let me know, all help is appreciated.
Warning: This program can and possibly will corrupt your data in
its current form! It is beta software, so treat it as such!
Thank you.
Note that the primary aim of nano is to emulate Pico while adding a
few key "missing" features. I do NOT want just a GPL'ed Pico clone,
nor do I want something that strays too far from the Pico design
(simple and straightforward). If you don't like this, feel free to
fork my code at any time, but please call your editor something
else, believe it or not I struggled awhile before coming up with
the name nano (and before that TIP), and it would be much easier for
everyone if there weren't five versions of the same program. As you
can guess, I'm not much of an emacs fan ;)
Chris Allegretta (chrisa@asty.org)
$Id$
882e145ebb