Nano is quite a venerable piece of software with the initial implementation shipping as pico, the text editor for the pine mail client, back in 1992. Tens of thousands of students at a few universities will have been introduced to it as their very first email client.

The pine authors fell foul of the Debian free software guidelines and, as well as nano, a clone for the mail client itself lives on to this day as alpine. I use it every so often for a spot of nostalgia.

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bombcar 2 days ago | parent [-]

This is exactly my path to it, and even though I know how to “eat flaming death” vi and used emacs for awhile, nano is still my default “edit that config file quickly”.

	▲	Firehawke a day ago \| parent [-]
		Same. My first internet access was a BSD shell account back in 1993; I had Pine and Pico on there. Coming from a world of MS-DOS BBSes (I ran one myself!) it wasn't that hard to take QEdit skills and move that over to using Pine and Pico-- it was quite comfortable. I still tend to muscle memory my way through using Nano when I need to do quick file edits on Linux.