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Comment by schemescape | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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