Eric J Ma's Website

Much as I've embraced the Atom text editor, there are times when the GUI isn't accessible to us, and we are forced to use a Terminal-based text editor.

Now, I'm not one of those crazy types who use emacs or vim - those are the real seasoned pros. (I still don't know how to exit vim, btw.) As such, my terminal editor of choice remains the venerable nano. Here's some hacks that I recently figured out, to make text editing much easier in nano.

(1) Syntax highlighting

This is such a big one! Syntax highlighting seriously helps a ton. If you're on a Mac, make sure you install homebrew's version of nano - you can look at my dotfiles or run the command:

$ brew install nano

Then, edit your ~/.nanorc file to look something like this:

include /usr/local/share/nano/python.nanorc  # gives you Python syntax highlighting
include /usr/local/share/nano/sh.nanorc  # gives you bash shell syntax highlighting

Next time you use nano (from your user account), syntax highlighting should be enabled!

You can find a sample .nanorc file on my GitHub dotfiles repository

(2) Keyboard Shortcuts

Here's a laundry list of keyboard shortcuts I've muscle-memorized:

• Ctrl-x: quits. There will be a prompt to save the file if it's been modified.
  • I usually end up doing Ctrl-x-y-Enter.
• Ctrl-v scrolls down a page
• Ctrl-y scrolls up a page
• Ctrl-w searches the document for a term that you type in (think "where")
• Ctrl-k cuts the line
• Ctrl-u pastes a cut line
• Ctrl-^ (i.e. Ctrl-Shift-6 on macOS keyboards) starts a "select" cursor.
  • You can use arrow keys to expand or shrink the selection, which can then be cut and pasted.
• Ctrl-c cancels any commands that are 'active'.
• Ctrl-o activates the "save file" dialogue - lets you save your state without quitting.

(3) Persistence

nano, being not as fancy as vim or emacs, means it doesn't have the concept of sessions. Doesn't matter - use tmux to persist!

All-in-all, the biggest one that aids in writing on a terminal editor is syntax highlighting. I wrote this blog post in nano, and being able to visually see different parts of my text highlighted according to their meaning has made writing much easier.