People who have used any distribution of Linux know about a very small and useful editor called nano. This editor is either included in the Linux itself or you can easily install through application managers for those flavors of Linux. For example, in Debian based Linux distributions, you can use the command sudo apt-get install nano for installing nano in a few seconds.
While Linux users can get nano editor quickly and use it for editing all kinds of text, source code or configuration files, Windows users are often left out. But good news is that now Windows builds of nano editor are also available. These are binary files that you have to just download and use. There is no confusing or difficult to understand instructions. It is native Windows PE file and does not have any extra requirements.
In order to install or setup nano editor in Windows, you can follow these quick steps:
- Download latest version of nano editor for Windows from https://files.lhmouse.com/nano-win/.
- Extract the contents of downloaded 7Z file to a folder. You may have to use 7-Zip for extracting files.
- Find nano.exe from inside the “bin” folder and copy it to C:\Windows\ folder of your PC.
- This is it. Now you can invoke nano.exe from anywhere in your Windows PC. You can basically launch command prompt and give command nano to invoke nano editor.
If you have never used nano before and are new to the GNU nano editor, then you may find a PDF file about the nano editor very useful. You can download this nano documentation from https://nano-editor.org/dist/v5/nano.pdf. It covers the basic use and all the options available for the nano editor. If you do not want to download the PDF version, then they also offer an online version of the nano editor documentation which is available from https://nano-editor.org/dist/latest/nano.html.