I use the nano text editor in preference to vim and have done for years. This is because we used Pine for email at university and my first job, the Pico text editor was used to compose mail messages. Due to the binary only distribution of pico, nano was created as an free software alternative. And that is why I use nano.

Since I migrated my blog to Nikola I’m using nano more frequently as I typically write my blog posts on a remote shell, so I thought I’d spend some time to tweak nano a little.

Keybindings

I refreshed my memory of some of the keyboard shortcuts available in nano to be a little more efficient.

• http://mintaka.sdsu.edu/reu/nano.html
• http://www.tuxradar.com/content/text-editing-nano-made-easy
• http://www.cheatography.com/davechild/content/nano-shortcuts/

Syntax Highlighting

Syntax Highlighting is the killer feature for nano that I’ve never bothered to configured in the past. I based my configuration one those provided by Craig Barnes. He uses mixins to ensure a consistent colour theme for all the language highlighters. I don’t use his custom key bindings however, it gets confusing when connecting to different hosts that have a default nano configuration.

• https://github.com/craigbarnes/nanorc