Frequently Asked Question

How do I use nano? What do the symbols at the bottom mean?

Nano is the friendly option, designed in 1999 as a free clone of Pine's Pico editor. Open a file with nano filename and you can start typing immediately, there are no modes. The bottom two lines of the screen show the command menu, and the ^ symbol means the Control key. So ^X means Ctrl+X (exit), ^O means Ctrl+O (write Out, the nano word for save), ^W means Ctrl+W (where is, i.e. search), and ^K and ^U are cut and paste.

A typical edit-and-save session is therefore: type your changes, press Ctrl+O, confirm the filename with Enter, then press Ctrl+X to exit. If you press Ctrl+X with unsaved changes, nano asks whether to save before leaving. Arrow keys, Home, End, Page Up and Page Down all work as you expect, and Ctrl+G opens the help screen.

Nano is perfect for the common case of "I just need to change one line in a config file." It has essentially no learning curve and is the default editor for several distributions and many system tools. Its limitation is that everything is done one character at a time, there are no higher-level motions, no macros, no plugin ecosystem, so for heavy editing it becomes slow compared with Vim.