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Nano is a curses-based text editor for Unix and Unix-like systems, licensed under the GNU General Public License. It is a free software clone of Pico, the editor of the Pine email client. Nano aims to emulate the functionality and easy-to-use interface of Pico, but does not have the tight mailer integration of the Pine/Pico package.

It was first created in 1999 under the name TIP (TIP isn't Pico), by Chris Allegretta. His motivation was to create a free software replacement for Pico, since neither it nor Pine were distributed under a free software license. The name was officially changed to Nano on January 10, 2000 because of a name conflict with another Unix program. The name comes from the system of SI prefixes, where nano is 1000 times bigger than pico, though the backronym "Nano's ANOther editor" is sometimes used. In February 2001, Nano became an official part of the GNU project.

More recently, Nano has added some features that Pico lacks, including colored text, regular expression search and replace, smooth scrolling, and multiple buffers.

On August 11, 2003, Chris Allegretta officially handed maintenance of Nano's unstable branch to David Lawrence Ramsey.

Future versions of Nano intend to add UTF-8 support, undo, and rebindable keys.

Control keys

Instead of being mouse-oriented, Nano, like Pico, is controlled with control keys. For example, Control-O saves the current file; Control-W goes to the search menu. Nano puts a two-line "shortcut bar" at the bottom of the screen, listing many of the commands available in the current context. For a complete list, Control-G gets the help screen.

Unlike Pico, Nano uses meta keys to toggle its behavior. For example, Meta-S toggles smooth scrolling mode on and off. Almost all features that can be selected from the command line can be dynamically toggled.

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