“GNU nano 5.0” Rolled Out

July 29, the developing team behind GNU nano text editor announced its latest major release “GNU nano 5.0 (Among the fields of barley)”. It is available for download from the project website.

GNU nano is a text editor for Linux and other UNIX OSs, which can be operated with a command-line interface. It is a clone of Pico, which is part of GNU Project, but there are some differences between them as to the functional aspect. Also, unlike Pico, GNU nano is released under the GPL. GNU nano 5 is the latest major release after GNU nano 4.0, released in March 2019.

This release introduces the –indicator option, which shows a kind of scroll bar on the right-hand side of the screen to indicate where in the buffer the viewport and how much it covers.

Now lines can be tagged with Alt+Insert keys, and Alt+Insert and Alt+PageDown let you jump to these tags.

The Execute Command can now be accessed directly from the main menu, along with the Linter, Formatter, Spell Checker, and other functions.

On terminals that support at least 256 colors, there are nine new colors (pink, purple, mind, orange, and more) available. As to the existing eight colors, like red and green, when prefixed with the word “light”, each color becomes brighter. Along with this change, now the word “bright” is deprecated.

It now supports -bookstyle mode, in which any line that begins with whitespace is considered as the start of a paragraph.

There are many other small feature enhancements included in this release.

GNU nano
https://www.nano-editor.org/