Technology Tales

Customising the nano editor using a personal configuration file stored in your home directory

Published on 31^st March 2026 Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

For a long time, I had not realised that the nano editor could be customised, and a look at /etc/nanorc on a Linux system will show what is possible. However, editing that file will not yield such permanent alterations, given the vagaries of system and package updates. Thus, the option of having a .nanorc file in your home directory has its uses. Here then are some settings that you can specify in this file to make the user-friendly editor even more useful:

set softwrap

By default, nano does not wrap long lines. For a time, I overlooked this, only for its use as a website content editor to change that. Adding this setting will wrap the long line to save some scrolling time and aid in getting a fuller picture of its contents. There is breaklonglines too, even though that adds hard breaks, which means that you get carriage returns added to your file, not always a desirable outcome.

set atblanks

To get the line wrapping to use spaces as a delimiter, define this setting. After that, you will not want to see words being broken up by line breaks.

set linenumbers

Many editors have line numbers which help to navigate files. Although nano has a shortcut for going to a particular line, line numbers are not set by default. This setting sets that to rights.

set indicator

Following on from the above, adding a bar on the right-hand side with the appearance of a scroll bar seen in other applications has its uses for seeing where you are in a file. That can help with orientation.

set nonewlines

By default, nano adds an extra blank line at the bottom of any file that it edits. While this may have uses for display using the cat command when an extra line avoids messing up where the command line prompts appear and having a ready location to add content at the end of a file, it always has looked odd to me. This setting turns off that behaviour to make things work like they do elsewhere.

set tabstospaces

In many editors, there is an option to turn tabs into spaces (SAS Enterprise Guide and entimICE are two examples that come to my mind as I write these words), and this will do the same within nano. That could be useful when making everything consistent within a file, especially after copying in code from elsewhere.

set tabsize 4

A recent discussion with colleagues at work revealed that we all indent code a little differently. The numbers of spaces had become the major differentiator, and the client had no standard for this. While four would be my choices, others have two, which is where this setting is helpful when it is used with the tabstospaces one described above.

This list is but a subset of what is on offer, and that is why the file mentioned at the start is well worth perusing. For all too long, I had not realised what was possible until editing of Markdown files caused me to wonder if nano could be made even better than it was when the default settings were active.