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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

Nano can compile programs, has tabs, syntax highlighting, line bookmarks, color schemes (your terminal’s), search/replace, and an extremely unsound way to wrap long lines. And while there’s no official plugin system, LD_PRELOAD is always an option ;)

A bit more seriously, the things that Geany has that Nano doesn’t are a GUI and plugins. Personally, I consider that still a text editor, although I’m sure someone could write a LSP plugin to blur the lines a bit…

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It has real tabs? Which you can click and that show the filename? And I'm also not aware of line bookmarks, and don't see them in the shortcut list? Also nothing for compiling the current project, but that I really might just miss.

The replace function though is a lot less powerful. Even if I give it the benefit of the doubt that probably there is a way to use regexpressions in an arcane syntax (because just entering them definitely does not work).

Though in general that exchange is typical for nano :) So many think it can do almost nothing and then are surprised when it can do so much more. Often included me. Like syntax highlighting, it was cool when I found out it can do that.

Yeah, the tabs show the filename. I have mouse support turned off so I’ve never checked if you can click on them, but I would expect that to work. IIRC bookmarks are bound to M-Insert by default; it should be in the man page somewhere. Regular expressions work if you press M-R once invoking the find dialog. Nano’s pretty powerful!

@saagarjha

can you share your nano configuration?

I can give you more than that, here’s my dotfiles: https://github.com/saagarjha/dotfiles. You may find that .nanorc a bit confusing so I suggest looking around at the other files with “nano” in their name for some context.

Click... in the VTY? I understand this is possible, I just did not realize people relied the functionality—it’s so easy to internalize truths like “people use the terminal to avoid using the mouse”.

Text user interfaces do have mouse support, though it has to be enabled by the running application (overriding the default use of mouse for copy/paste). `gpm` even gives you support in the text-only console. And it should work over a remote SSH connection.

I thought of that partly because my terminal can do that with its tabs, urxvt. Though it's not the same thing probably. But I know that nano has mouse support, which I have enabled.

But it was more to describe real tabs. I don't see them in nano, just a bar at the top with "[1/n] filename", and no tabs. Searching for nano and tabs does not help of course, and I saw nothing in the manpage. So it was a try to describe the kind of tabs geany has.

Yep - I find it very handy in vim (and yes, you can click on the tabs in vim too). Clicking and dragging selects things in visual mode, and you can also drag your tabs to reorder them.

Also works in tmux - you can drag your splits to resize them, or select a tmux "tab" to switch to it. You can also select text and then do things with it, like search back in the scrollback for other occurrences, or copy it to the system clipboard. Right click even brings up an in-cli context menu.

i use it in vim all the time, and in tmux.

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