Nano was a (bloated as usual) GNU clone of Pico. Its only reason for existing is GPL freedumb nonsense that was popular back in the day. It copied the UX of Pico.

Pico was not developed as a standalone editor; rather it was the builtin editor for the Pine email reader. Hence the weird keybindings — it followed the UX of the email client.

Pico stood for PIne COmposer.

It became a simple universal editor because vi and emacs sucked and for some reason no one felt it necessary to invent something better.

Users repurposed the editor from a mail client because it was already there. Nearly every university Sun box in the 90s had Pine installed for reading email.

It was written by the same guy that invented IMAP at the University of Washington.

Can't wait for the Rust clone of Nano then the cycle will be complete.

When you launch nano without a file loaded, there's a notice at the bottom of the screen: [ Welcome to nano. For basic help, type Ctrl+G. ]

Press 'Ctrl + G' and it takes you to a help page that says, among other things, "Shortcuts are written as follows: Control-key sequences are notated with a '^' and can be entered either by using the Ctrl key or pressing the Esc key twice. Meta-key sequences are notated with 'M-' and can be entered using either the Alt, Cmd, or Esc key, depending on your keyboard setup."

You can't force a user to read docs or learn how the programs they're using work, but this is a reasonable attempt.

> Command-line option --modernbindings (-/) makes ^Q quit, ^X cut, ^C copy, ^V paste, ^Z undo, ^Y redo, ^O open a file, ^W write a file, ^R replace, ^G find again, ^D find again backwards, ^A set the mark, ^T jump to a line, ^P show the position, and ^E execute.

> Above modern bindings are activated also when the name of nano's executable (or a symlink to it) starts with the letter "e".

So if you symlink nano to /usr/bin/editor and make it the default $EDITOR, then you now do get CUA-like bindings by default.

There’s still a lot of more things they perhaps should enable by default. I don’t know whether you’ve looked into .nanorc, but you can turn on stuff like syntax highlighting and line numbers, it’s just all off by default.

I don’t actually use nano myself, but I was really taken aback by how featureful it is when you look closely. Not st the level of Vim or Emacs, but more than expected. I basically stumbled upon someone on Reddit /r/unixporn that "riced" their nanorc and it piqued my curiosity.

For most people though, I think micro is a better fit than nano if you want a terminal CUA-style editor.

At least "Uncut" has been renamed to "Paste".

Reminds me of that House MD episode where the delivery driver was a secret genius who was abusing DXM to dumb himself down just to feel happy.

"For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief."