I was introduced to nano by pico the default editor with the alpine mail
client loaded when composing or replying to mail. It was part of the
alpine package and could be used indenpendently as a text editor.
Nano is a much improved pico and can be substituted for use in alpine.
In the '90's I used dial up to a shell acount to use alpine and used pico
and later nano as my text editor.
Currently I use both in the terminal of a mac.
The key to making best use of nano is to configure the features one wants
in the nanorc file. This includes key mapping for each option with
ctrl+letter.
The port for the mac comes with a text nanorc.sample file which notates all
the options.
If this is not available in other distributions I would be happy to send it
as an attachment.
On Fri, 16 Jun 2017, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
Yes, this thread is interesting. I think I'll try some of what people
have suggested. I've tried nano a few times, but I clearly didn't find
all the places where I could learn to make it do more of what I wanted.
In 1979, the only thing I knew about computers was that I didn't have
one. I was in school for another line of work. My serious time on
computers began in the spring of 1989, and I got at least half-seriously
into Linux in around 2005. At that time, such editing as I did was
using emacs, but mostly I've used vim.
Anyway, I appreciate the info on this thread.
Al
On 06/16/2017 11:24 AM, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
This has been an interesting thread so far. I began using
unix in 1989 on a DEC system which used the trade name of Ultrix
and the standard editor was vi so I've stuck with vi ever since
since it is so common.
Well, ultrix went away many years ago and my working
group used Sunos for several years as well as IBM's aix and
finally Linux and I kept using vi.
To me, nano was and mostly still is that aggravating
application one gets on a new Debian system before we have time
to fix it.
I have on rare occasions used it long enough to do
something that just had to be done quickly and wasn't too
complicated but the first thing I noticed was that rather echoing
the characters I was typing, it echoed the current column number
on the line which is probably what happens with show-cursor on.
As I said, this usually happens when you are trying to
fix something that is seriously broken and people are waiting and
breathing down one's neck so I have never been too happy to hear
"gnu nano 2.x.y" instead of what one usually hears when vi or vim
fires up and one knows what the keys do so you can concentrate on
the task at hand.
Shortly before I retired, one of my coworkers asked me if
I would put nano on the FreeBSD system we were using as the unix
machine in our department. I installed it with no problem and
realized that I was dealing with someone who was used to nano and
didn't like to use vi any more than I liked to be forced to use
nano so as far as I was concerned, it was turn abouts, fair play.
It's kind of a case of saying "yes" when you possibly can rather
than hassling somebody over basically nothing.
When I first started out in 1989, I was using an EchoGP
hardware synth through an IBM PC/XT running DOS and kermit as the
terminal emulator and I now use Debian Linux with speakup. These
are the good old days right now-- not perfect, but certainly
better than when I first started using computers which was 1979
on an Apple II followed in the eighties by IBM PC's and clones.
By the way, elvis was a DOS version of vi that I used a
lot back in the day. Don't forget that we all walked 5 miles up
hill to and from school in the snow even in Summer.
Martin McCormick
_______________________________________________
Blinux-list mailing list
Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
_______________________________________________
Blinux-list mailing list
Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
XB
_______________________________________________
Blinux-list mailing list
Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list