GNU 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.

nano aims to solve these problems by emulating the functionality of Pico as closely as possible while addressing the problems above and perhaps providing other extra functionality.

The nano editor is now an official GNU package.

Installation

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 with configure to override the default installation directory of /usr/local.

Here are some key features of "GNU nano":

· More Pico compatible by default.
· Smooth scrolling (-S flag).
· Bracket matching (Meta-]).
· .nanorc support.
· Color syntax highlighting.
· Search and replace history editing.
· Customizable quoting string (-Q flag)
· Append/prepend from write file menu.
· Write selected text to file (^O after ^^).
· Multiple file buffers (-F flag).
· Mac/Dos/NoConvert file format (-M,-D,-N).
· Saved search/replace history (-H flag).
· Backup files (-B flag).
· Insert output of command (^X after ^R)

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· Issues with the new sped-up syntax highlighting code were corrected.
· Other fixes include configure-time detection of groff HTML support before attempting to generate the HTML version of man pages.
· Using ~ or ~username syntax in .nanorc should now work again.
· Also, nano will now only ask for one acknowledgment of errors it encounters when parsing nanorc files, and a new -q (--quiet) flag will silence these messages altogether.