This update of the nano terminal editor brings crash fixes, key-binding restoration, and a small but useful option tweak.
Overnight, the easy-to-use text editor Gnu Nano (generally presented as GNU nano) released version 9.2 “Alquézar.” The announcement was made by the project’s developer, Benno Schulenberg, on info-nano@gnu.org and other mailing lists. The release comes about five weeks after the release of Nano 9.1.
Nano is a relative newcomer to the *nix sphere, having first appeared in late 1999 as a free-software replacement for Pico, which at the time was released under a proprietary license. The project was created by Chris Allegretta who named it Tip, a recursive acronym for “TIP Isn’t Pico.” A couple of months later, the name was changed to Nano to avoid confusion with the existing Unix tip utility. Nano is a numerical prefix that is 1,000 times larger than a pico.
In February 2001, Nano officially became part of the Gnu Project, and the following month saw the release of version 1.0 as Gnu Nano’s first production release.
According to Schulenberg’s email, this new release has fixed some issues and added a new option. The fixes include an issue in which Nano wouldn’t start when being outputted to anything other than a terminal, and the legacy keystroke pairs ^W^T and ^/^T are recognized again. Also fixed was an issue in which an overlong search history was causing crashes, along with another issue in which Shift+End failed to scroll sideways.
For the new option, ‘newbuffer’ and ‘set newbuffer’ were added as better synonyms for ‘multibuffer’ and ‘set multibuffer.’
The Tarball of the new version and its signature are available online. For those wanting to take Nano for a first-time spin, there’s an online manual for learning your way around, as well as an overview of its command keystrokes.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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