95dd873205
The bindings for F1 to F12 are there for compatibility with Pico. But Pico does not know anything about F13 to F16; for unknown reasons they were added to nano. They seem hardly useful: normal keyboards do not have the F13 to F16 keys, and very few people know that they can "produce" those keys by holding Shift with F1 to F4. But typing Shift plus F1 to F4 are just as "hard" as, for example, M-G and M-W, so why anyone would want to use the first ones...? Especially since many other functions of nano can only be accessed through Meta and Control combinations. Furthermore, F13 to F15 haven't been shown in the help texts since version 2.3.3, so for more than four years no new user will have learned about those keystrokes. The rare user who wants these strange bindings can easily make them herself.
GNU nano -- an enhanced clone of the Pico text editor
Overview
The nano project was started because of a few "problems" with the
wonderfully easy-to-use and friendly Pico text editor.
First and foremost was its license: the Pine suite does not use
the GPL or a GPL-friendly license, and has unclear restrictions on
redistribution. Because of this, Pine and Pico are not included
with many GNU/Linux distributions. Also, other features (like
go-to-line-number or search-and-replace) were unavailable until
recently or require a command-line flag. Yuck.
nano aims to solve these problems by emulating the functionality of
Pico as closely as possible while addressing the problems above and
providing other extra functionality.
The nano editor is an official GNU package. For more information on
GNU and the Free Software Foundation, please see http://www.gnu.org/.
How to compile and install nano
Download the nano source code, then:
tar xvzf nano-x.y.z.tar.gz
cd nano-x.y.z
./configure
make
make install
It's that simple. Use --prefix with configure to override the
default installation directory of /usr/local.
If you haven't configured with the --disable-nanorc option, after
installation you may want to copy the doc/sample.nanorc file to
your home directory, rename it to ".nanorc", and then edit it
according to your taste.
Web Page
https://nano-editor.org/
Mailing Lists
There are three nano-related mailing-lists.
+ info-nano@gnu.org is a very low traffic list used to announce
new nano versions or other important info about the project.
+ help-nano@gnu.org is for those seeking to get help without
wanting to hear about the technical details of its development.
+ nano-devel@gnu.org is the list used by the people that make nano
and a general development discussion list, with moderate traffic.
To subscribe, send email to <name>-request@gnu.org with a subject
of "subscribe", where <name> is the list you want to subscribe to.
Bug Reports
To report a bug, please file a description of the problem on nano's
bug tracker (https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=nano -- hover on
"Bugs", then click "Submit new"). The issue may have already been
reported, so please look first.
Current Status
Since version 2.5.0, GNU nano has abandoned the distinction between
a stable and a development branch: it is now on a "rolling" release
-- fixing bugs and adding new features go hand in hand.
Copyright Years
When in any file of this package a copyright notice mentions a
year range (such as 1999-2011), it is a shorthand for a list of
all the years in that interval.