The nano project was started because of a few "problems" with the
wonderfully easy-to-use and friendly Pico text editor.
First and foremost was its license: the Pine suite does not use
the GPL, and (before using the Apache License) it had unclear
restrictions on redistribution. Because of this, Pine and Pico
were not included in many GNU/Linux distributions. Furthermore,
some features (like go-to-line-number or search-and-replace) were
unavailable for a long time or require a command-line flag. Yuck.
Nano aimed to solve these problems by: 1) being truly free software
by using the GPL, 2) emulating the functionality of Pico as closely
as is reasonable, and 3) including extra functionality by default.
Nowadays, nano wants to be a generally useful editor with sensible
defaults (linewise scrolling, no automatic line breaking).
The nano editor is an official GNU package. For more information on
GNU and the Free Software Foundation, please see https://www.gnu.org/.
Clone the latest nano source version, then:
cd nano
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install
It's that simple. Use --prefix with configure to override the
default installation directory of /usr/local.
If you haven't configured with the --disable-nanorc option, after
installation you may want to copy the doc/sample.nanorc file to
your home directory, rename it to ".nanorc", and then edit it
according to your taste.
https://nano-editor.org/
There are three nano-related mailing-lists.
+ info-nano@gnu.org is a very low traffic list used to announce
new nano versions or other important info about the project.
+ help-nano@gnu.org is for those seeking to get help without
wanting to hear about the technical details of its development.
+ nano-devel@gnu.org is the list used by the people that make nano
and a general development discussion list, with moderate traffic.
To subscribe, send email to <name>-request@gnu.org with a subject
of "subscribe", where <name> is the list you want to subscribe to.
To report a bug, please file a description of the problem on nano's
bug tracker (https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=nano -- hover on
"Bugs", then click "Submit new"). The issue may have already been
reported, so please look first.
Since version 2.5.0, GNU nano has abandoned the distinction between
a stable and a development branch: it is now on a "rolling" release
-- fixing bugs and adding new features go hand in hand.
When in any file of this package a copyright notice mentions a
year range (such as 1999-2011), it is a shorthand for a list of
all the years in that interval.