GNU nano 5.0 releases: powerful text editor
Nano is a text editor on Unix and Unix-like systems and a replica of Pico. The goal of nano is a full-featured yet easy-to-use editor like Pico. Nano is a free software that complies with the GNU General Public License. Since the 2.0.7 release, the license has been upgraded from GPLv2 to GPLv3.
Changelog v5.0
- With --indicator (or -q or ‘set indicator’) nano will show a kind
of scrollbar on the righthand side of the screen to indicate where
in the buffer the viewport is located and how much it covers.- With <Alt+Insert> any line can be “tagged” with an anchor, and
<Alt+PageUp> and <Alt+PageDown> will jump to the nearest anchor.
When using line numbers, an anchor is shown as “+” in the margin.- The Execute Command prompt is now directly accessible from the
main menu (with ^T, replacing the Spell Checker). The Linter,
Formatter, Spell Checker, Full Justification, Suspension, and
Cut-Till-End functions are available in this menu too.- On terminals that support at least 256 colors, nine new color
names are available: pink, purple, mauve, lagoon, mint, lime,
peach, orange, and latte. These do not have lighter versions.- For the color names red, green, blue, yellow, cyan, magenta,
white, and black, the prefix ‘light’ gives a brighter color.
Prefix ‘bright’ is deprecated, as it means both bold AND light.- All color names can be preceded with “bold,” and/or “italic,”
(in that order) to get a bold and/or italic typeface.- With --bookstyle (or -O or ‘set bookstyle’) nano considers any
line that begins with whitespace as the start of a paragraph.- Refreshing the screen with ^L now works in every menu.
- In the main menu, ^L also centers the line with the cursor.
- Toggling the help lines with M-X now works in all menus except
in the help viewer and the linter.- At a filename prompt, the first <Tab> lists the possibilities,
and these are listed near the bottom instead of near the top.- Bindable function ‘curpos’ has been renamed to ‘location’.
- Long option --tempfile has been renamed to --saveonexit.
- Short option -S is now a synonym of --softwrap.
- The New Buffer toggle (M-F) has become non-persistent. Options
--multibuffer and ‘set multibuffer’ still make it default to on.- Backup files will retain their group ownership (when possible).
- Data is synced to disk before “… lines written” is shown.
- The raw escape sequences for F13 to F16 are no longer recognized.
- Distro-specific syntaxes, and syntaxes of less common languages,
have been moved down to subdirectory syntax/extra/. The affected
distros and others may wish to move wanted syntaxes one level up.- Syntaxes for Markdown, Haskell, and Ada were added.