Nano Text Editor

Nothing beats a good text editor, and sometimes it is just not practical to download a file, edit it on your computer, and then upload it back to your server. Furthermore, if you have SSH access to your dedicated server or web hosting account, why not use it? Linux offers a couple of good text editors that do not require a graphical interface. One widely-used editor is is called Vi, but there is an alternative.

Nano, which is a clone of the Pine email client editor called Pico, is an ncurses-based text editor (meaning it simulates a graphical interface within the Linux shell). It is easy to use and offers many features, such as searching through a document, that make it very useful for quick code editing. All of Nano’s features can be accessed using the control key. For example, Control-W opens a search, and Control-X exits.

Because of the ncurses environment, Nano can also use a mouse and function almost like a graphical text editor that you would have on your desktop computer. The big advantage, particularly on a dedicated server is that you can edit configuration files as root quickly and easily. Nano, unlike it’s predecessor Pico, is free software released under the GNU General Public License. Nearly all Linux distributions either ship with it or offer it in their repositories.