This month has the same days of week as the month I was born in. So there is a Friday the 13th and a week later a Friday the 20th, the day I was born. Since I came so early, around 26 weeks, I used to joke that I was lucky to be born a week after a Friday the 13th. Surely if I had been born a week earlier than I was, I might not have made it.
This is nano, which is alot like pico, the editor that was inside of elm and pine mail readers. In fact I just found out that is has some of the same key bindings as emacs and by default it does line-wrap at the set right margin. It is actually pretty comfortable to use. It is touted as a command line editor alternative to vi or vim and emacs. I am running inside of terminal and so I assume that I could make the font bigger anytime, even though I am only editing text. The status bar at the top of the screen says simply that I am using Nano 2.0.7 and that this file has been modified. I like the fact that by default I can just type and not worry about setting fill mode, this editor was clearly influienced by people writing text, although the documentation clearly says that it can work on code with syntax highlghting.
The line wrap works by default, but the docs say that there is a justify feature, C-j, since I am comfortable with typing text blocks, you know, paragraphs, I don't see the need for me, but the docs showed how, lots of back and forth edits, insertions, deletions, would result in jagged blocks that would need to be justified; so, that makes sense to me, now. I guess that I have a skill at composing text on the fly that is for the most part in its best sequence. People whose mind flits about more must make more use of the insertions and deletions that would make justify more important to them.
The most important commands, all control sequences, are shown at the bottom of the screen. It is clear that this editor was carefully designed and I am sure that its footprint is much less than emacs. I think that I will give it a chance as a possible alternative, but so far I have tried many editors and for one reason or another I have always gravitated back to emacs. One urge that is already nagging at me with this is the need to string or regular expression replace, to, in this case make some of the paragraph tags into close paragraph, new paragraph tag pairs. That would be easy if I were editing this file in emacs. It is getting time to RTFM for nano before I pass judgement.
It might be fun to see if I can transform this text file into an HTML file and see if nano helps me with highlighted markup.
I wonder why the equivalent of "save file" is "writeout" or C-o? Maybe C-s was kept in the old usage of flow control. I just tried C-s and got a funny message "XOFF ignored, mumble, mumble", so why not use it for file save?
One of the gotchas of using several editors is the confusion of commands, and especially between vi and emacs and closely related variants. It can both be a blessing and a curse: easy to transition but easy to confuse. Even given the differences between vi and emacs, I still mistakenly type emacs sequences to vi, which causes trouble, and generally I perfer emacs to vi because of the editing modes of the latter, but emacs setting major modes is still problematic and it doesn't always do the right thing given a reasonable extension. I know that with modest effort I can set emacs' defaults to more of what I like to do. Nano seems to have a leg up in this regard.
So, now lets save this as a text file and then intentionally rename a copy to an HTML file and see if we get markup help.
It didn't try to help and I even cheated to the extant that I didn't bother with the paragraph closing tag encouraged, or required by XHTML. My mind is back on the problem of creating XML within an HTML document, maybe the XHTML standard allows this, to provide something an php script that generated on-the-fly directory indices could use to document anchors. I can generate directories in the simple way, just reading a directory, but I'd like to reach inside the files for some data created when the file is created.Funny thing, even though what started out as a text file to nano is now an HTML file, Mozilla gives me a bar cursor as though I could edit the HTML in WYSIWYG, and so when I saw a typo at the top of this, I tried to fix it, no mass. Oh, BTW Emacs' end of the line, C-e works the same way in Nano.