GNU nano

Last updated
GNU nano
Original author(s) Chris Allegretta
Developer(s) Benno Schulenberg
Initial release18 November 1999;24 years ago (1999-11-18) [1]
Stable release
8.1 [2]   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg / 12 July 2024
Repository
Written in C
Operating system Cross-platform
Included withGNU based operating systems
Available inEnglish
Type Text editor
License 2007: GPL-3.0-or-later [lower-alpha 1] [3]
2001: GPL-2.0-or-later [lower-alpha 2] [4]
1999: GPL-1.0-or-later [lower-alpha 3]
Website nano-editor.org OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

GNU nano is a text editor for Unix-like computing systems or operating environments using a command line interface. It emulates the Pico text editor, part of the Pine email client, and also provides additional functionality. [5] Unlike Pico, nano is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Released as free software by Chris Allegretta in 1999, nano became part of the GNU Project in 2001. [6] The logo resembles the lowercase form of the Greek letter Eta (η).

Contents

History

GNU nano was first created in 1999 with the name TIP (a recursive acronym for TIP Isn't Pico), by Chris Allegretta. His motivation was to create a free software replacement for Pico, which was not distributed under a free-software license. The name was changed to nano on January 10, 2000, to avoid a naming conflict with the existing Unix utility tip . The name comes from the system of SI prefixes, in which nano is 1000 times larger than pico. In February 2001, nano became a part of the GNU Project.

GNU nano implements several features that Pico lacks, including syntax highlighting, line numbers, regular expression search and replace, line-by-line scrolling, multiple buffers, indenting groups of lines, rebindable key support, [7] and the undoing and redoing of edit changes. [8]

On 11 August 2003, Chris Allegretta officially handed the source code maintenance of nano to David Lawrence Ramsey. [9] On 20 December 2007, with the release of 2.0.7, Ramsey stepped down as nano's maintainer. [10] The license was also upgraded to GPL-3.0-or-later. [11] The project is currently maintained by Benno Schulenberg. [12]

On version 2.6.0 in June 2016, the current principal developer and the other active members of the nano project decided in consensus to leave the GNU Project, because of their objections over the Free Software Foundation's copyright assignment policy, and their belief that decentralized copyright ownership does not impede the ability to enforce the GNU General Public License. [13] [14] [15] [16] The step was acknowledged by Debian and Arch Linux, [17] [18] while the GNU Project resisted the move and called it a "fork". [19] On 19 August 2016, Chris Allegretta announced the return of the project to the GNU family, following concessions from GNU on copyright assignment for Nano specifically, [20] which happened when version 2.7.0 was released in September 2016. [21]

Control keys

GNU nano, like Pico, is keyboard-oriented, controlled with control keys. For example, Ctrl+O saves the current file; Ctrl+W goes to the search menu. GNU nano puts a two-line "shortcut bar" at the bottom of the screen, listing many of the commands available in the current context. For a complete list, Ctrl+G gets the help screen.

Unlike Pico, nano uses meta keys to toggle its behavior. For example, Meta+S toggles smooth scrolling mode on and off. Almost all features that can be selected from the command line can be dynamically toggled. On keyboards without the meta key it is often mapped to the escape key, Esc, such that in order to simulate, say, Meta+S one has to press the Esc key, then release it, and then press the S key.

GNU nano can also use pointing devices, such as a mouse, to activate functions that are on the shortcut bar, as well as position the cursor.

See also

Notes

  1. GPL-3.0-or-later: Since 2.0.7.
  2. GPL-2.0-or-later: From 1.0.6 and 1.1.3 to 2.0.6.
  3. GPL-1.0-or-later: TIP 0.5.0 to Nano 1.0.5 and Nano 1.1.2.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bash (Unix shell)</span> GNU replacement for the Bourne shell

Bash, short for Bourne-Again SHell, is a shell program and command language supported by the Free Software Foundation and first developed for the GNU Project by Brian Fox. Designed as a 100% free software alternative for the Bourne shell, it was initially released in 1989. Its moniker is a play on words, referencing both its predecessor, the Bourne shell, and the concept of rebirth.

Pico is a text editor for Unix and Unix-like computer systems. It is integrated with Pine and Alpine, email clients initially designed by the Office of Computing and Communications at the University of Washington.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pine (email client)</span> Email and newsgroups client

Pine is a freeware, text-based email client which was developed at the University of Washington. The first version was written in 1989, and announced to the public in March 1992. Source code was available for only the Unix version under a license written by the University of Washington. Pine is no longer under development, and has been replaced by the Alpine client, which is available under the Apache License.

GNU Mach is an implementation of the Mach microkernel. It is the default microkernel in the GNU Hurd. GNU Mach runs on IA-32 machines. GNU Mach is maintained by developers on the GNU project. It is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GnuTLS</span> Free software library implementing TLS

GnuTLS is a free software implementation of the TLS, SSL and DTLS protocols. It offers an application programming interface (API) for applications to enable secure communication over the network transport layer, as well as interfaces to access X.509, PKCS #12, OpenPGP and other structures.

This article provides basic comparisons for notable text editors. More feature details for text editors are available from the Category of text editor features and from the individual products' articles. This article may not be up-to-date or necessarily all-inclusive.

GNU Readline is a software library that provides in-line editing and history capabilities for interactive programs with a command-line interface, such as Bash. It is currently maintained by Chet Ramey as part of the GNU Project.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joe's Own Editor</span>

JOE or Joe's Own Editor is an ncurses-based text editor for Unix systems, available under the GPL. It is designed to be easy to use.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MicroEMACS</span> MicroEMACS is a small text editor program from the EMACS family

MicroEMACS is a small, portable Emacs-like text editor originally written by Dave Conroy in 1985, and further developed by Daniel M. Lawrence (1958–2010) and was maintained by him. MicroEMACS has been ported to many operating systems, including CP/M, MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, VMS, Atari ST, AmigaOS, OS-9, NeXTSTEP, and various Unix-like operating systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNU Bazaar</span> Version control system

GNU Bazaar is a distributed and client–server revision control system sponsored by Canonical.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MIT/GNU Scheme</span>

MIT/GNU Scheme is a programming language, a dialect and implementation of the language Scheme, which is a dialect of Lisp. It can produce native binary files for the x86 processor architecture. It supports the R7RS-small standard. It is free and open-source software released under v2 or later of the GNU General Public License (GPL). It was first released by Guy Lewis Steele Jr. and Gerald Jay Sussman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1986, as free software even before the Free Software Foundation, GNU, and the GPL existed. It is now part of the GNU Project.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNU IceCat</span> Firefox derivative recommending only free software

GNU IceCat, formerly known as GNU IceWeasel, is a completely free version of the Mozilla Firefox web browser distributed by the GNU Project. It is compatible with Linux, Windows, Android and macOS.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geany</span> Integrated Development Environment

Geany is a free and open-source lightweight GUI text editor using Scintilla and GTK, including basic IDE features. It is designed to have short load times, with limited dependency on separate packages or external libraries on Linux. It has been ported to a wide range of operating systems, such as BSD, Linux, macOS, Solaris and Windows. The Windows port lacks an embedded terminal window; also missing from the Windows version are the external development tools present under Unix, unless installed separately by the user. Among the supported programming languages and markup languages are C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, PHP, HTML, LaTeX, CSS, Python, Perl, Ruby, Pascal, Haskell, Erlang, Vala and many others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNU Emacs</span> GNU version of the Emacs text editor

GNU Emacs is a free software text editor. It was created by GNU Project founder Richard Stallman, based on the Emacs editor developed for Unix operating systems. GNU Emacs has been a central component of the GNU project and a flagship project of the free software movement. Its tag line is "the extensible self-documenting text editor."

Emacs, originally named EMACS, is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display editor". Development of the first Emacs began in the mid-1970s, and work on GNU Emacs, directly descended from the original, is ongoing; its latest version is 29.4, released June 2024.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNU General Public License</span> Series of free software licenses

The GNU General Public License is a series of widely used free software licenses, or copyleft, that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general use and was originally written by Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), for the GNU Project. The license grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the Free Software Definition. The licenses in the GPL series are all copyleft licenses, which means that any derivative work must be distributed under the same or equivalent license terms. It is more restrictive than the Lesser General Public License and even further distinct from the more widely-used permissive software licenses such as BSD, MIT, and Apache.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Natron (software)</span> Open source compositing software

Natron is a free and open-source node-based compositing application. It has been influenced by digital compositing software such as Avid Media Illusion, Apple Shake, Blackmagic Fusion, Autodesk Flame and Nuke, from which its user interface and many of its concepts are derived.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNU Guix System</span> Rolling release distribution of the GNU operating system built around the GNU Guix package manager

GNU Guix System or Guix System is a rolling release, free and open source Linux distribution built around the GNU Guix package manager. It enables a declarative operating system configuration and allows system upgrades that the user can rollback. It uses the GNU Shepherd init system and the Linux-libre kernel, with the support of the GNU Hurd kernel under development. On February 3, 2015, the Free Software Foundation added the distribution to its list of endorsed free Linux distributions. The Guix package manager and the Guix System drew inspiration from and were based on the Nix package manager and NixOS respectively.

References

  1. "first tarball that is still available (tip-0.5.0.tar.gz)".
  2. "[Info-nano][ANNOUNCE] nano-8.1 is released". 12 July 2024. Retrieved 13 July 2024.
  3. "COPYING file". 11 August 2007. Retrieved 2 December 2020 via GNU Savannah.
  4. "NEWS". 2001-10-26.
  5. The nano FAQ: https://www.nano-editor.org/dist/v2.2/faq.html#1.3
  6. Official website FAQ. (accessed 17 February 2016.)
  7. Allegretta, Chris (18 March 2008). "GNU nano 2.1.0". Nano-devel mailing list. gnu.org. Retrieved 18 March 2008.
  8. Allegretta, Chris (23 March 2015). "GNU nano 2.4.0". Nano-devel mailing list. gnu.org. Retrieved 18 April 2015.
  9. Allegretta, Chris (11 August 2003). "GNU nano 1.3 branch opened in CVS". Nano-devel mailing list. gnu.org. Retrieved 25 January 2007.
  10. Ramsey, David Lawrence (20 December 2007). "Stepping down as the nano maintainer..." Nano-devel mailing list. gnu.org. Retrieved 20 December 2007.
  11. NEWS in nano.git "Finally, nano is now licensed under the GNU GPL version 3 or later, and its documentation is now dual-licensed under the GNU GPL version 3 or later and the GNU FDL version 1.2 or later." (20 December 2007)
  12. "GNU nano: Who's who". www.nano-editor.org. Retrieved 2020-11-08.
  13. nano news on nano-editor.org "And, with this release, we take leave of the herd... Bye! And thanks for all the grass!" (22 June 2016)
  14. remove the GNU marker from nano's name on savannah.org by Benno Schulenberg (13 June 2016)
  15. Re: (Nano-devel) Should nano stay a GNU program (Was: time for a 2.5.4-p on lists.gnu.org (7 May 2016)
  16. sr #109076: Request to move nano from gnu to nongnu on savannah.gnu.org by Benno Schulenberg (22 June 2016)
  17. "Accepted nano 2.6.0-1 (source amd64) into unstable".
  18. "svntogit/packages.git - Git clone of the 'packages' repository".
  19. I'm on the GNU maintainers team; I want to clarify a couple things about this: First, Nano has _not_ left the GNU Project on news.ycombinator.com by Mike Gerwitz (June 2016)
  20. Chris, Allegretta (19 August 2016). "[Nano-devel] nano to remain in GNU". lists.gnu.org. Retrieved 2 September 2016.
  21. nano news on nano-editor.org "With this release we return to GNU. For just a little while we dreamt we were tigers. But we are back in the herd, back to a healthy diet of fresh green free grass." (1 September 2016)