35 useful Nano Commands and Shortcuts for Raspberry Pi users

Nano is not the most intuitive text editor, it’s difficult for a beginner, but when you master the key shortcuts you will save much time in files edition.
As an old vim user, I know what I’m talking about 🙂 but Raspberry Pi and Raspbian promote nano as the default editor, so it’s better to know how to use it.

Nano is a text editor, installed by default on Raspberry Pi. Use “nano <filename>” to open it, and one of the many shortcuts available to make changes in a file.

We’ll see of these, and more, so if you remember them and use them as often as possible, you’ll master the main nano commands and shortcuts.
I voluntarily removed everything that is not indispensable, so you can focus on the primary shortcuts.

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Nano commands

Before opening a file and seeing all the shortcuts available, you have to know that nano offers many options when opening a file.
In this first part, I’ll show you what you can do directly in the command line and general shortcuts:

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• Opening nano
  nano
nano <filename>
  The filename can be an existing file or the new filename you want to create.
  It can be just the name in the current folder, or a path to the file.
  Don’t forget to use sudo if you need root access to edit the file:
  sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config
• Nano options
  You can start nano with many useful options I will show you here:
  • +line,column: open the file and place the cursor at the specified position
  • -B: create a backup file when saving (backup file starts with a ~)
  • -C <dir>: keep each version of the file in the specified backup directory
  • -Y <language>: force the syntax highlighting for the specified language
    Available languages are located in /usr/share/nano/*.nanorc
  • -l: Shows line numbers in the left column
    
  • -v: Read-only mode
• Exit nano
  To exit Nano at any time, you can use CTRL+X.
• Shortcut cancel
  Nano provides many shortcuts and if you type one by error, you can exit the contextual menu with CTRL+C.

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Files

For file management, there aren’t many commands to know. To be sure you know how to do this, here are the two commands you will need to use:

• Create a new file
  To create a new file, the easiest way is to tell nano the filename directly when starting it, like this:
  nano /dir/file.txt
  If you just use nano to open it, it will ask you a filename when saving.
• Save a file
  To save a file at any time you can use CTRL+O.
  Don’t ask me how they chose the shortcut key ^^.
  CTRL+S ? Nooo, it would have been too easy for us :).

Search and in file navigation

Another feature I use a lot with Vim and never took the time to master on nano, was the search in file (by the way, if you don’t know Vim, I have an article about it here).
Here is everything you need to know about this:

• Search for a string
  To locate a string in a file, you can use CTRL+W.
  
  Then enter the string (or regular expression if you want), and confirm with Enter.
  While typing the string, you can use a few options to filter your search results (like case-sensitive search).
• Next item in the search results
  To move to the next matching result, use ALT+W.
• Go back to the first line of the file
  If you are lost in the file, you can move back to the beginning with ALT+\.
• Go to the end of the file
  The same thing, to move directly to the end of the file, use ALT+/.
  Please, don’t use the down arrow 58 times to do this :).
• Move one screen up
  For fast scrolling, use CTRL+Y to move to the previous page of the file.
• Move one screen down
  And the opposite, CTRL+V is to move to the next page.

Navigation through lines and columns

To move more precisely in a file, here are the keys and shortcut to use:

• Move on a line or from line to line
  Arrows 🙂
  I don’t really understand why there are so many shortcuts to move from a character or line to another.
  For me, arrows are the easiest way to do the same.
  Arrow up: previous line
  Arrow down: next line
  Arrow left: previous character on the same line
  Arrow right: next character on the same line
  I think it’s a good idea to keep all of this easy when possible.
• Go directly to the beginning of the line
  To go to the first character of the line you can use CTRL+A.
• Go to the end of the line
  And for the last character on the line, use CTRL+E.

Content edition

Ok in this part we move to the file-edition process.
You can save time by remembering a few shortcuts.

• Undo
  To cancel your last action, you can use ALT+U.
• Redo
  If you change your mind, use ALT+E to finally make it.
• Copy and paste strings or lines
  Another thing to keep simple, don’t use shortcuts for this.
  When you use nano on your Raspberry Pi you’re probably using SSH, so use your client features to manage copy and paste.
  Copy: Select a text or line with the mouse
  Paste: Move to the paste spot and right-click to paste
• Cut an entire line
  If you want to cut or remove a line, you can use CTRL+K to do this.
  I often use this to remove useless lines.
• Paste the line
  To paste the line you just cut, use CTRL+U.
• Editing
  For everything else, use nano like any other text editor.
  It’s a nano strength to allow you to edit a file directly.
  Working keys are for example Backspace to delete a character, TAB to indent, Enter to add a new line, etc.

Nano options

And finally, here are a few other useful shortcuts for Nano I didn’t give you in the previous parts:

• Remove the help
  To stay focused on your file, you can hide the bottom shortcut help with ALT+X.
  This way you get one or two extra lines of your files on the same screen.
  Same shortcut to show it back.
• Disable syntax highlighting
  When syntax highlighting doesn’t help, you can disable it while editing with ALT+Y.
  
  Did you never have the ugly dark blue color exactly where you need to focus? 🙂
• Enable backup
  If you didn’t set it when starting nano, you can enable backup at any time while in nano with ALT+B.
• Display the help for all shortcuts
  If one shortcut I give you here was not clear, or if you want to see the long list of not so useful shortcuts, use CTRL+G to display the nano help.

Conclusion

That’s it!
We are already at the end of this list of commands and shortcuts to know to use nano like a pro.

If you like it, you can also check my post with 57 essentials commands to know on Raspberry Pi.

And if you want to try another text editor, you can always try Vim on your Raspberry Pi, or one of these best text editors I’ve picked here.