GNU nano
Nano is a text editor for Unix and Unix-like systems, licensed under the GNU General Public License. It is a free software clone of Pico, the editor of the Pine email client. Nano aims to emulate the functionality and easy to use interface of Pico, but does not have the tight mailer integration of the Pine/Pico package.
It was first created in 1999 under the name TIP (TIP isn't Pico) by Chris Allegretta. His motivation was to create a free software replacement for Pico, since neither it nor Pine were distributed under a free software license. The name was officially changed to Nano on January 10, 2000 because of a name conflict with another Unix program. In February, 2001, Nano became an official part of the GNU project.
More recently, Nano has added some features that Pico lacks, including color support, regular expression search and replace, and smooth scrolling.
On 11 August 2003, Chris Allegretta officially handed maintenance of Nano's unstable branch to David Lawrence Ramsey.[1]
Future versions of Nano intend to add UTF-8 support, undo, and rebindable keys.
See also: Emacs, GNU, Pico text editor, Pine email client, Vi