A short guide to nano
New Course Coming Soon:
Get Really Good at Git
nano
is a beginner friendly editor.
Run it using nano <filename>
.
You can directly type characters into the file without worrying about modes.
You can quit without editing using ctrl-X
. If you edited the file buffer, the editor will ask you for confirmation and you can save the edits, or discard them. The help at the bottom shows you the keyboard commands that let you work with the file:
pico
is more or less the same, although nano
is the GNU version of pico
which at some point in history was not open source and the nano
clone was made to satisfy the GNU operating system license requirements.
→ Get my Linux Command Line Handbook
Here is how can I help you:
- COURSES where I teach everything I know
- CODING BOOTCAMP cohort course - next edition in 2025
- BOOKS 16 coding ebooks you can download for free on JS Python C PHP and lots more
- Follow me on X