Nicer nano

Sun, 08 Nov 2026 11:00:00 +0100

I don’t use nano as my primary text editor, I prefer to use a desktop GUI text editor whenever possible. But it is good to also have a terminal based editor available since you can use it when you log in to a remote machine over SSH, and easily editing root owned files locally (that can be tricky with a desktop GUI text editor).

My choice is nano since it is almost universally available, preinstalled on most Linux machines and also available on MacOS. And compared to the other universally available text editor, vim, it is actually usable!

2026/11 on Mikael Ståldal's technical blog

Nicer nano