Well I said in my initial Gentoo post that I would detail how to make Nano the text editor default to non-word wrap mode so you don’t have to specify the -w option everytime to edit a file.

You need to make sure you have a .nanorc file in your home directory. If you don’t there should be one in /etc/ (/etc/nanorc). So copy that one:

cp /etc/nanorc ~/.nanorc

Now edit the file

 nano -w ~/.nanorc

I uncommented the following options:

  • set autoindent
  • set mouse
  • set nowrap
  • set smarthome
  • set smooth

I also inserted some syntax based colouring options (I think I found most of them either in nanorc or forums.gentoo.org)

Edited: If you want to look at the syntax colouring download the nanorc file attached to this blog entry. It’s easier to read anyway.

Hooray for nano!