Unit 2 · Basic Commands · Lesson 22 of 34
Nano-ing Around!
Nano-ing Around!
Building on the previous lesson, let's dive into GNU nano. Nano comes installed by default on the vast majority of Linux installations, regardless of distro or flavor, thanks to its extremely lightweight nature. It runs entirely inside the terminal and uses a fraction of the memory that GUI-based text editors need.
To use nano, type nano into your terminal along with the file you want to edit or read as the first argument:
[user@linux]$ nano file.txt
Once you're inside the editor, it works like pretty much any text editor. The main roadblock with nano is the keyboard shortcuts needed to perform essential functions like saving, searching, and exiting. Here are the core shortcuts you'll need:
Having these shortcuts fully memorized isn't necessary right now, they'll come naturally the more you use nano throughout this course and future ones.
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