In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nano Text Editor on cPanel 8. For those of you who didn’t know, GNU nano is a small editor for on the terminal. It includes all the basic functionality same as other text editors such as UTF-8 encoding, syntax highlighting, search and replace with regular expression support, multiple buffers, spellchecking, and more. Nano is often preferred by new users because of its simplicity, compared to other command-line text editors such as vi/vim and emacs.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of Nano on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, and Rocky Linux distributions.
Prerequisites
- A server running one of the following operating systems: AlmaLinux 8, CentOS, and Rocky Linux 8.
- It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
- SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
- A
non-root sudo useror access to theroot user. We recommend acting as anon-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.
Install Nano Text Editor on AlmaLinux 8
Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.
sudo dnf update sudo dnf install epel-release
Step 3. Installing Nano Text Editor on AlmaLinux 8.
By default, Nano is available in the AlmaLinux 8 base repository. Now we install Nano text editor using the following command below:
sudo dnf install nano
You can check whether nano is installed or not issue the below command:
nano --version
Step 3. Using Nano Text Editor.
To use Nano text editor on AlmaLinux is quite easy. From the command prompt, just type nano, then we will be faced with a media editing console. By using Nano we can: create a new document, edit a document, searching a context on a document.
For example, to open an existing file, add the file name to the command. For example, if the file is called sample-file.php, the command will be:
nano sample-file.php
Here is a list of some of the nano useful commands, but probably you already know most of them:
| Command | Explanation |
| CTRL + A | Let’s jump to the beginning of the line. |
| CTRL + E | Let’s you jump to the end of the line. |
| CTRL + Y | Scrolls page down. |
| CTRL + V | Scrolls page up. |
| CTRL + G | A Help window will pop out and show you all the available commands. |
| CTRL + O | To save the file. Nano will ask you to edit or verify the desired file name. |
| CTRL + W | Search for a specified phrase in your text. Press ALT + W to search for the same phrase again. |
| CTRL + K | It cuts the entire selected line to the cut buffer (similar to the clipboard). |
| CTRL + U | To paste the text from the cut buffer into the selected line. |
| CTRL + J | Justifies the current paragraph. |
| CTRL + C | Shows the current cursor position in the text (line/column/character). |
| CTRL + R | Opens a file and inserts it at the current cursor position. |
| CTRL + X | To exit Nano text editor. It prompts a save request if you made any changes to the file. |
| CTRL + \ | Replaces string or a regular expression. |
| CTRL + T | Invokes the spell checker, if available. |
| CTRL + _ | Let’s go to the specified line and column number. |
| ALT + A | To select text. You can combine this command with CTRL + K to cut a specific part of the text to the cut buffer. |
Congratulations! You have successfully installed Nano. Thanks for using this tutorial to install the Nano Text Editor on your AlmaLinux 8 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Nano website.
