Talk:GNU nano

GNU?
Should the name be changed to reflect the fact the main maintainer has left GNU and forked out. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.231.193.34 (talk) 15:22, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11953044 According to someone on ycombinator claiming to be from gnu, they are continuing to maintain gnu nano, but the 2 largest maintainers by far have left. 68.227.172.26 (talk) 21:18, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

Name difficulties
It isn't clear to me what the correct name of this program is, and I'm one of its authors. Possibilities are You can find all four instances on the official Nano home page. I prefer "Nano", which is where the article is now. The program's current maintainer prefers "nano". dbenbenn | talk 15:23, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)
 * 1) Nano
 * 2) nano
 * 3) GNU Nano
 * 4) GNU nano
 * Well, Nano (text editor) is fine IMO, but it needs a notice saying that the "n" should be lowercase. It also needs to be changed althroughout the article. At least that is MO, since it is "GNU emacs" in the software. -Signed, Zregika 04:32, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Seeing as the program is called nano in itself, I am switching all instances of "Nano" to "nano." ~Linuxerist [[Image:Tux.svg|15px]][[Image:Nuvola apps emacs.png|15px]] E/L/T 02:10, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Also fixed the image captions, but someone should take another screenshot of nano editing the most recent version of the article. 218.102.71.150 10:10, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
 * I took a screenshot of nano (2.1.2-SVN) editing its source code..wasn't able to edit the article at the time. Legiøń (talk) 18:03, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

New version?
According to the freshmeat RSS-feed and the there given download-url (http://pooka_regent.tripod.com/downloads/nano/ChangeLog.txt), there's a new version 2.0.0 out as of Nov, 6th, 2006.

Caused by the fact, that there's no update done to the official website of Nano, I didn't updated the version-number and referred to this discussion.

Wikipedia's text editor?
From the screenshot, it looks like this is the same text editor that Wikipedia uses on the 'edit' page. Should we make a mention of this? I don't think it's too self-referential, and it is an interesting comment. --Andyroo316 23:30, 27 May 2007 (UTC)
 * It may look similar, but it really isn't all that similar at all (in fact, it only really looks similar in that both have an open text area, and there are control functions listed on the bottom). Nano though is a clone of non-GPL pico, which in turn is the text editor for the pine email client.  All of them predate Wikipedia, and the basic look and feel has been around as long as I remember (I first encountered pine around 1998-1999ish, but I presume the look and feel has been around much longer). –Pakman044 22:56, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Marked as stub?
I think this is a bit short, should it be marked as a stub? Mr. Man (talk) 18:22, 3 August 2010 (UTC)
 * There isn't much to say about it - and this is largely complete. No need to stubify it. Voomoo (talk) 00:17, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

WP:NOTCHANGELOG
I've reverted the addition of the changelog, because unless reliable sources give that much emphasis to each and every release (and pre-release) then it doesn't belong in a summary-style article. It's one thing to include a few notable changes that might have occurred (with reliable sources showing that they're significant), but this is unnecessary. - Aoidh (talk) 19:35, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

nano: no longer a GNU project?
There was a discussion on Reddit that says nano is no longer a GNU project. A quick pick to the site linked has only a vague message that says


 * "And, with this release, we take leave of the herd... Bye! And thanks for all the grass!"

Should we rename this page to just nano and add a section of its removal from GNU Project or wait for the details?

(EDIT: And by the way.. one of the maintainers have begun to remove the GNU name from nano. I'm still finding my way through the backstory) Konimex (talk) 15:37, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

UPDATE: they're GNU again. From the 2016 September 1 entry on their news page, "With this release we return to GNU. For just a little while we dreamt we were tigers.  But we are back in the herd, back to a healthy diet of fresh green free grass Sleety Dribble (talk) 16:27, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

Wasn't TIP a recursive acronym?
On 22 April 2011, someone changed the expansion of "TIP" from "TIP Isn't Pico" to "This Isn't Pico". I was a bit hesitant to change it back since it seems to have gone unremarked for over six years, but I'm pretty sure TIP was intended as a recursive acronym. The FAQ confirms that here, so, I've been bold an' all that and made the change. Revert away if I've missed some point. Sleety Dribble (talk) 16:20, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

'nano' or 'Nano'?
Which one? This article is currently inconsistent in this respect. --Mortense (talk) 21:55, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Edit to the Control Keys section
The section itself is good, but there's one thing left out that's going to confuse users who are fairly new to Linux: nano uses a very old convention for referencing or using control keys, which looks like this on the screen: ^N is used both to show control keys, and to use them as back when nano was written, many keyboards didn't have a Control Key and this was the customary replacement. In fact, the screen shot of nano in use shows a list of control keys in this format at the bottom of the screen. I think that this section should be expanded to explain this as new Linux users will find it hard to use nano, or any program that expects input in this format. JDZeff (talk) 19:38, 15 June 2024 (UTC)