Enjoy Writing with nano

nano is a command line text editor that is installed on most Linux or BSD distributions. It’s really cute and offers everything I need to write everything but code. This note is in fact written with nano, and I also use it to work on my academic papers. I experience most editors as completely overloaded with things that I actually don’t need. All of the following assumes that you are comfortable with hanging around a shell.

Setup

nano should be installed on your computer if you use any Unix-like system, and if not, just do a quick research for your distribution. nano uses a config file for it’s settings and on my Linux, this file lives under ~/.nanorc. It looks like this:

# Language
include "/usr/share/nano/markdown.nanorc" 

# Sets what spelling utility to use.
set speller "aspell -x -c"

# Settings
set atblanks        # wrap line at blanks.
set nohelp          # Disable the help information 
set softwrap        # Enable softwrap of lines.
set tabsize 4       # Sets tab-to-spaces size to 4.
set tabstospaces    # Converts TAB key press to spaces.
set constantshow    # Displays useful info in bottom bar
set casesensitive   # Case insensitive search.
set historylog      # Save the last 100 history searches for later use.
set zap             # Allows you to highlight text and delete it with backspace.
set autoindent      # A new line will have the same indent
set minibar         # Displays info in bottoms bar.

# Enable and set a working backup directory
set backup                              # Creates backups of your current file.
set backupdir "~/.cache/nano/backups/"  # The location of the backups.

# Enable completion suggestions
bind ^Space complete main

Besides nano, I installed aspell and sdcv. The former is a command line utility that checks a text file for mistakes, and sdcv is a command line dictionary. aspell should be easy to install, again, check your distro for guides. For sdcv, check the wonderful notes of Rek Bell, on how to “install a terminal dictionary”.

Usage

nano let’s you write directly, and doesn’t need you to memorize some cryptic keyboard shortcuts to change between reading and editing modes. My settings above slightly change how nano is looking by removing some of the UI. Most notably, there is a shortcut help on the bottom of the screen, that I don’t need present all the time. If you M- or ^ in the snippets bellow, on my systems that means press Alt key and… and press Ctrl key and …

to create/edit plain text file enter nano "hello kitty.txt" in your terminal
show nano help page ^G (and close it with ^C or ^X)
toggle shortcut help M-X
save ^S and close file ^X, and don’t worry, if there are unsaved changes, nano will ask you
get the current word and character count with M-D

Spell Checking

^T followed by ^S will kick off the spell checker that is set up in .nanorc

If there is no spell checker set up, this will not work. But if that is done correctly, aspell will start a process of going through all the words that it thinks are wrong and let’s you decide what to do with it. There are most likely ways on how to use different languages for the spell checking, but I haven’t looked into that yet.

Dictionary Lookup

^T opens the command prompt, and if sdcv is set up correctly, simply type sdcv WORD nano will copy the results of the dictionary lookup directly into the file that you have open right now. You can then read or copy parts of that, and if you want to remove it simply undo the lookup with M-U.

Completion Suggestions

This functionality is included in newer nano version, but has to be mapped to a keyboard shortcut. In my settings I mapped it to ^Space, so pressing Ctrl and Space automatically completes a word. Keeping Ctrl pressed and repeatedly pressing Space rotates through all the possibilities, which are taken from the words in the present file.

Enjoy Writing with nano

Setup

Usage

Sources