Want to move pages at a time instead? Ctrl+V moves down a page, and Ctrl+Y moves up a page.Д«ut wait, thereвЂ™s more! To move forward and backward one word at a time, you can use Ctrl+Space and Meta+Space (remember, thatвЂ™s Alt+Space). Missing the Home and End keys? You can use Ctrl+A and Ctrl+E. In other words, you can use those keys instead of the Right, Left, Up, and Down arrows, respectively. To move up and down one line at a time, you can type Ctrl+P and Ctrl+N. To move the cursor forward or backward, you can type Ctrl+F and Ctrl+B.

Of course, you can always use the Home, End, Page Up, Page Down, and the arrow keys to get around, but that requires moving your fingers from the letters that we all love so much. Now that weвЂ™ve got a hang of shortcuts, letвЂ™s get used to moving around a text file very quickly. Nano will politely ask you if you want to save your buffer, and you can cancel this action as well. When you want to quit nano, you just hit Ctrl+X. On most keyboard layouts, Meta equates to the Alt button. There are also some commands that require use of the Meta key. You can hit Escape twice instead of holding down the Control key, if you have trouble doing that. You can cancel both of the previous commands by typing Ctrl+C. If you want to insert the contents of another file into your current buffer, youвЂ™d type Ctrl+R. YouвЂ™ll be prompted for a filename to use, and the shortcuts at the bottom will change to reflect what you can enter to complete this particular command. This is called вЂњwriting outвЂќ and is executed by hitting Ctrl+O. LetвЂ™s say youвЂ™re working on a new text file, or вЂњbuffer,вЂќ and you want to save it. When youвЂ™re done looking at the list, hit Ctrl+X to exit help. Hit Ctrl+G to bring up the Help documentation and scroll down to see a list of valid shortcuts. All shortcuts use lowercase letters and unmodified number keys, so Ctrl+G is NOT Ctrl+Shift+G. Note that nano does not use the Shift key in shortcuts. The most common ones are listed at the bottom of the screen, but there are many more that arenвЂ™t. Program functions are referred to as вЂњshortcutsвЂќ in nano, such as saving, quitting, justifying, etc. ItвЂ™s pretty simple, so type some text out, or copy something and paste it into your terminal so we have something to play with.

ItвЂ™s a WYSIWYG editor вЂњwhat you see is what you get.вЂќ What you type directly goes into the text input, unless you modify it with a key like Control or Meta.

Nano text editor mac