After several months of development the people in charge of the popular GNU Nano editor has released the news of the release of the new official release of version 4.0 of Nano.
This new version, whose code name is «Thy Rope of Sands«, Becomes the successor to the previous version 3.2, also known as« Het Kromme Hout », which was released last November.
This program allows, like all other text editors (Notepad or NotePad ++ on Windows, Vim or Emacs on Linux), modify plain text files (bold, italic, underlined ...).
About Nano
GNU nano or rather simply known as Nano is a text editor for Unix and Derivative systems published under the GNU GPL that is based on the ncurses library.
Nano is a free clone of Pico, the text editor for Pine email software. Nano takes the functionality and simplicity of the Pico interface by removing the latter's heavy reliance on Pine.
Over time, Nano has distinguished itself from Pico by offering features previously lacking in Pico: line-by-line scrolling, syntax highlighting, text search and replacement with rational expressions, ability to edit multiple buffers ...
Like Pico, GNU nano is used with modifiers (key combinations in this case) that include the Ctrl key (Ctrl-O, Ctrl-W, Ctrl-G…). The fact that it can also be used with modifiers, including the Alt key, sets it apart from Pico.
Nano also has a two-line status bar at the bottom of the screen that lists shortcuts to commands available in the current context.
Almost all the functions that can be activated from the command line can be dynamically changed during editing in this tool.
What's New in GNU Nano 4.0
This new version of GNU Nano 4.0 adopts smooth scrolling (one line at a time) by default.
With this new version, a long line of code is no longer auto-segmented when moving to the next line, a newline character is no longer added to the end of the buffer and when a line continues outside the screen box, it now ends with the ">" symbol highlighted.
The line below the title bar is now included by default in the edit space and when the marked text is justified, it becomes a unique and distinct paragraph.
It is also possible to cancel all justifications like any other operation and the "Alt + Up" and "Alt + Down" key combinations can now be used for line scrolling.
Other new features o improvements introduced in this new release of the GNU Nano 4.0 version, we can find the following:
- - jumpyscrolling (-j) that allows scrolling in half screen.
- –Finalnewline (-f) which returns the automatic new line to EOF.
- - emptyline (-e) that leaves the line below the title bar unused.
- –Guidestripe = which draws a vertical bar in a given column.
- –Breaklonglines (-b) that allows to reactivate the automatic and forced passage to the line.
It is important to emphasize that it must be taken into account that the option –Rebinddelete is able to compensate for other link errors, the options –Morespace and --smooth are in disuse.
And the –disable-wrapping-as-root configuration option has been removed in GNU nano 4.0.
In this new version, the functions «cutwordleft" Y "cutwordright» have been renamed ("Chopwordleft" and "chopwordright" respectively) because they don't use cutbuffer and the paragraph break functions have been moved from Search to Go -to-Line.
Download GNU Nano 4.0
For those who are interested in being able to install this new version of the Nano 4.0 editor, they can download its source code from its official website and build on your own on your system in order to have this new version.
Although the compiled versions will be ready shortly for the different Linux distributions.
If you are interested in compiling on your own, you can download Nano 4.0 from this link.