nano

nano

a small and friendly text editor

curl -fsSL https://unflab.app/get | sh -s -- nano

Installs to ~/.local/bin. Add --prefix /usr/local/bin to
put it somewhere else, or --uninstall to remove it.

Why it’s here

Escapes a dependency tree: Homebrew’s build pulls in libraries this tool never touches at run time.

Details

Built from that exact tarball, with its SHA-256 pinned in the
recipe. The binary links against nothing outside /usr/lib
and /System/, checked in CI before release.

---

GNU nano, the small modeless editor that tells you its keys along the
bottom of the screen. Ctrl-O writes, Ctrl-X exits, Ctrl-W
searches, Ctrl-K/Ctrl-U cut and paste.

gnunano file.txt                # edit a file
gnunano +42 file.txt            # open at line 42
gnunano -Y sh script.sh         # force a syntax

The name

macOS has a nano already, and it isn’t this one: /usr/bin/nano is a
symlink to /usr/bin/pico, the UW PICO editor that GNU nano was
written as a free replacement for. It doesn’t read a nanorc, doesn’t
highlight syntax, and doesn’t handle UTF-8.

So this installs as gnunano, following the convention macOS
itself uses for gnumake, and also symlinks nano to it in the same
directory. Which one wins when you type nano depends on PATH order —
the post-install notes explain how to check, and setting $EDITOR and
$VISUAL to gnunano sidesteps the question entirely.

./install.sh --no-plain skips the nano symlink and installs only
gnunano.

Install

./install.sh                      # into ~/.local/bin
./install.sh --prefix /usr/local/bin
./install.sh --uninstall

Syntax highlighting

39 syntax definitions are installed to share/nano/, but nano doesn’t
read them until a nanorc says so. The shipped sample.nanorc is
upstream’s fully-commented example:

cp ~/.local/share/nano/sample.nanorc ~/.local/share/nano/nanorc
ln -s ~/.local/share/nano/nanorc ~/.nanorc

Then uncomment the include .../*.nanorc line near the bottom.
man nanorc documents every option.

About this build

One binary depending on nothing but libSystem — not even the system’s
curses.

That last part is the interesting bit. macOS ships ncurses, but only
the narrow build: there is no libncursesw, and the SDK’s curses.h
doesn’t declare the wide-character functions. A nano configured against
it builds fine and then mangles every non-ASCII character. Rather than
ship that, this build compiles ncurses 6.6 from source with
--enable-widec and links it statically, so UTF-8 works and there is
still no shared library to conflict with anything.

Terminal descriptions come from macOS’s own database at
/usr/share/terminfo, with six common terminals compiled in as
fallbacks. Nothing is installed to duplicate what the OS already has.

Built with --disable-nls (drops the gettext dependency; the interface
is English) and --disable-libmagic (syntax is matched on filename and
first line, which is what the shipped syntaxes use anyway).

rnano, the restricted mode for giving someone an editor and nothing
else, isn’t packaged — it’s a multi-user-server tool.

Upstream

• Home: https://www.nano-editor.org/
• Version: 9.2
• Licence: GPL-3.0-or-later (see LICENSE)

The source tarball is verified against upstream’s OpenPGP signature,
whose key is in the GNU keyring.

nano is the work of the GNU nano contributors. unflab only compiles
and packages it.