Small, Sharp Software Tools

Editing Text with GNU nano

Throughout this book, you’ve created files with echo, touch, and cat, and you’ve edited files with sed, but sometimes you need to make more substantial modifications to existing files. Or, to be more honest, sometimes it’s just more comfortable to use a more familiar method of creating and editing text. GNU nano^[14] is a basic text editor that’s great for beginners, and it’s available in a lot of environments out of the box. Let’s look at how to use nano to create and edit files, and how to configure it to enable more options.

 

Joe asks:

Why not Vim or Emacs?

Both Vim and Emacs require a significant amount of time and ...