Presentation

[okibcn]

NANO FOR WINDOWS

This is the Windows version of the legendary GNU nano text editor, a small and compact CLI editor that packs a world of functionality in a small footprint (less than 300KB) based on the pico editor.

GNU nano is constantly being upgraded, but the original project is limited to providing support and functionality only for Linux. This project is meant to bring the latest updates to Windows 64/32.

Features ported to Windows

Pretty much everything is supported except for Linux-specific functions. We can highlight:

• interface customization: colors, key shortcuts, line numbers, scroll bar...
• Syntax coloring for 47 different types of documents. It can be upgraded thanks to community support, for instance here or here.
• multi-document editor.
• UTF-8 encoding support.
• Supplement Unicode characters support, including all the languages and emojis 😜in the CLI interface.
• Mouse support for scroll and cursor location.
• Line wrap, search, cut, copy & paste, and all the basic functions of any full-fledged editor.

Installation

The easier way to install nano is by using Scoop package manager.

1. Open a PowerShell terminal (version 5.1 or later) and run:

> Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope CurrentUser # Optional: Needed to run a remote script the first time
> irm get.scoop.sh | iex

2. Add the nano for windows app directly from its bucket:

> scoop install https://raw.githubusercontent.com/okibcn/Bucket/master/bucket/nano.json

Known Issues

• Pipes in Windows are not working yet.

[rashil2000]

Instead of PDCurses, will it be possible to use the mingw variant of ncurses? It is available here: https://packages.msys2.org/base/mingw-w64-ncurses

Ncurses supports much more features than PDCurses, like colored, bold and italic variations.

[okibcn]

No @rashil2000, it is not possible. That version you mention is specific for MSYS2 and this project is cross-compiled entirely from Linux.

For the curses lib, I used PDCursesMod instead of PDCurses or ncurses because it offers the best windows implementation. For instance, full Unicode, including emojis, is only possible AFAIK in PDCurses. REgarding bold, italic and other variations, PDCurses is even more capable with a 64 bit structure allowing for more cell attributes.

The minGW implementation in MSYS2 also has severe limitations in its 32 bits version.