Opinionated, or just old and consistent? Nano is a clone of an editor related in 1989. Things weren't as settled back then. IIRC, I remember Ctrl-X was used to exit some DOS apps. IIRC, the current "GUI conventions" originated as Mac-isms in 1983/84.
> Ctrl+S for saving, Ctrl+F for find, Ctrl+Z for undo, Ctrl+Q to exit etc. etc. There is also a helpful hint at the bottom of the screen that you can press Alt+G to see the shortcuts, or Ctrl+G for some help.
So, about that Ctrl-C...
That old hotkeys didn't survive the evolution so it doesn't make sense to support them anymore.
No. It makes sense to support them if the userbase is familiar with them. Nothing is more annoying than having changes like that forced on you.
Then there's the fact that the "GUI standards" conflict with other command-line standards in a pretty serious way. Every command shell on Windows I've ever used uses a different convention than the "GUI standard" for copy-paste for exactly that reason (e.g. Windows Command Prompt's "mark" stuff, PuTTY's select/middle-click behavior).
No, the point of nano was to be like pico.
I think that every user who can use terminal, knows combinations like Ctrl + S (Save) or Ctrl + C (Copy). So they are familiar to them as well and should cause no problems.
For me, for example, those combinations from vi, nano or emacs are simply weird and non-standard. And I assume that they are "non-standard" for everyone who was born after 1980 and have never seen a PDP or something from that era.
Therefore it doen't make sense to support those key combinations only because 40 years ago they were used in PDP and other archaic systems.
OK, you write the memo about replacing Ctrl-C for SIGINT.
Every single Linux user who edits text on a cli amd hasn't bothered to learn vim.
Using a flow control sequences for editor commands; what can go wrong?
Hopefully a cautionary tale against careless in-band signalling.
Many of us carried that to our VT100 terminals and used it when lines of code or output would flood the screen faster than we could read.
Eventually paginators like 'more' and 'less' were invented and flow control via the keyboard codes for XON/XOFF fell out of favor, but some of us have very strong muscle memory. :)
Whenever I use Windows my fingers are surprised to remember that the windows key isn't used for menu commands.
I find myself thinking I'm in nano mode and wanting to repeat searches forward and backward outside of nano so often, that when I realise I need to do something other than Alt-W/Alt-Q I have a mini-depressive episode.