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GNU nano

A small, beginner-friendly terminal text editor.

nano is a simple terminal editor designed for users who do not want to learn the modal commands of vi or the keybindings of Emacs. The most useful keystrokes are listed at the bottom of the screen at all times. nano was originally created as a clone of the Pico editor that shipped with the Pine email client, and became the default editor in many Debian-derived distributions.

It is the editor most often launched by tools like git commit, sudo visudo, and crontab -e on a fresh Linux install, and remains a sensible default for users who only need to edit a configuration file occasionally.

License: GPL-3.0-or-later

Category: Editor

Website: https://www.nano-editor.org/

Install

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install nano
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install nano
Arch:          sudo pacman -S nano
macOS:         brew install nano

Authors

  • Chris Allegretta (original author, 1999)
  • Benno Schulenberg (current maintainer)
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