OSXFAQ Mac OS X UNIX Tip-of-the-Day  

Week 106 - New in Tiger (2 January 2006)

by Adrian Mayo - Editor, OSXFAQ

Tuesday - Pico is Nano

The pico editor was a very popular and easy to learn Unix text editor. It was part of the PINE email toolset, and as such had some critical limitations such as a lack of search and replace. It has been replaced by the GNU nano editor. Nano is compatible with pico, but offers extra features.

The official home site for nano, www.nano-editor.org, is a useful resource for nano users. Most important for users of pre-10.4 releases of Mac OS X, which didnt include nano, the site provides free downloads of the program. Here are instructions for installing it:

Download the source by clicking the link at the bottom of the screen labeled Get Nano, and then clicking on the file nano-[versionnumber].tar.gz. The source builds right out of the box in Panther. Type the following lines into the Terminal window (the version number may differ from the one shown here).

$ tar xzf nano-1.2.5.tar.gz
$ cd nano-1.2.5/
$ ./configure
  # ...much output here....
$ make
$ sudo make install
Password:
  # ...output here...

The executable will be installed into /usr/local/bin/nano, and the man pages into /usr/local/man/. If /usr/local/bin is not in your search path, you will either need to add it, or else invoke nano using its full pathname.