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Comment by lovelyviking | Hacker News Reader

I decided once to recompile nano on mac os because it has some bug or some color missing. I don’t remember why exactly but I do remember a lot of trouble with dependencies … and then my impression was that this tiny editor - is a monster.

It is of course depends with what you compare but still it was shockingly bigger then I was prepared/wanted to see

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>I decided once to recompile nano on mac os because it has some bug or some color missing. I don’t remember why exactly but I do remember a lot of trouble with dependencies

Apple is weird about nano. By default, it uses Pico when you try to use nano, which is the text editor that nano is based off of. It seems to be because of concerns over the GPLv3, but the switch isn't made clear to the user, which is pretty deceptive.

I was shocked to discover that the source code distribution for GNU nano is over 3 megabytes.

To be fair, it also has more features than I expected, e.g. syntax highlighting. And I’m sure it runs on an obscene number of platforms.

I'm usually not one who complains about bloat, but I think this does not meet expectations set by the name "nano".

Keep in mind that nano's name is derived from the fact it's a clone of pico, and things might start to make more sense. GNU nano's name is a play on words, not a statement about its size.

Indeed, one would expect it to be 1000 times bigger than pico. At 3 MB that's even plausible...

And “Pico” is the message composing editor originally written for the “Pine Is Not Elm” email client.

I mean, 300kB is just the changelog and >1MB is configure script... Translations take up a lot as well.

I am not arguing nano is pinnacle of minimalism, but it is not like it's 3MB of C code.

Nano has syntax highlighting?!

yes. and you can turn it off with passing option:

-Y none

or:

—-syntax=none

Nano has a surprising amount of features. I actually use it as my main text editor, and I rarely find myself lacking anything I could possibly want. Off the top of my head, it has the ability to run 3rd party code, a file browser, autoindenting, linting, macros, and a rudimentary autocomplete. A lot of it's reputation for being weak comes from bad defaults, which can be quickly fixed by ricing your nanorc file.

First time I heard about nanorc!

There’s something really cool about Nano. It’s almost everywhere, it’s super simple, but doesn’t have bonkers key combos like vi and emacs.

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