GNU Nano parameters
January 19th, 2009
I use GNU nano a lot for text file editing in Linux. One of the things annoying was the lack of a cursor position. Many tools prompt with something like: error on line 42. Nano can show the actual cursor position by pressing Ctrl+O, but I want to see it permanently
Another annoying issue was word wrapping. When I pasted a line inside the terminal and this line was longer than the standard 80 characters the line was broken apart. Imagine a 800 chars line, you have to correct 10 lines of text 
The solution to these problems were simple, just launch nano with:
$ nano -cw
You can also create an alias in your bashrc.conf with:
alias nano=’nano -cw’
This will makes sure Nano uses the specified parameters every time it is launched.
GNU Nano