nano

From Mac Guides

This article is about the Terminal command nano. You may be searching for the iPod nano.

nano is a Terminal application used to edit text files in a simple and familiar manner. As nano is a terminal program, it does not support the mouse, and all cursor movements must be done by the keyboard. Some of nano's commands are not standard to the Mac OS X experience. Here are some common commands:

Save File 

ctrl-O (Output)

Cut 

ctrl-K (Kut, and acts on the entire current line)

Paste 

ctrl-U (Uncut)

Find 

ctrl-W (Where is...)

Quit 

ctrl-X (eXit)

Page Down 

ctrl-V (looks like a down arrow)

Page Up 

ctrl-Y (looks nothing like an up arrow)

Help 

ctrl-G (Get help)

nano was written in 1999 as a clone to pico, which is licensed software, originally bundled with the terminal mail program, pine. In Mac OS X, and may other linux distributions, pico is symbolically linked to nano.

Examples

To edit a text file

  nano SomeNewFile.txt

Man Page Excerpt

This manual page documents briefly the nano command. nano is a small, free and friendly editor which aims to replace Pico, the default editor included in the non-free Pine package. Rather than just copying Pico's look and feel, nano also implements some missing (or disabled by default) features in Pico, such as "search and replace" and "go to line number".

See Also

• vi
• emacs
• http://www.nano-editor.org/