Software: nano - nthu-ioa/cluster GitHub Wiki

The most powerful and efficient text editor for scientific computing is probably vim. However, many people like to use the simpler editor nano.

With some attention to configuration options (see man nano and man nanorc), nano can be much better than its defaults. For example, you can turn on syntax highlighting, tab replacement and autoindent, which makes writing python a bit easier.

The Centos 7 default version of nano is 2.3, which is ancient and out of touch with lots of how-to guides for using nano. It doesn't even have an 'undo' feature! A more up to date version (8.0) is available through module load nano/8.7.

To avoid overlap between the configuration of the default nano/2.3 and nano/8.7 from the module, we have set up nano/8.7 to expect a user configuration file called ~/.nanorc_8.7 instead of the default ~/.nanorc. If this file does not exist, you will get a warning when you module load nano. To make the warning go away, you can create a minimal (empty) nanorc_8.7.

[!TIP] Time spent learning the basics of vim may be a better investment than time spent becoming a super-expert in nano.