OT: BTW, I seemingly didnt notice before but somewhere along the way, I guess we made it!

On Tue, Jan 13, 2026 at 01:03:37AM -0500, Chris Allegretta wrote:
> But this is also a pretty substantial change in behavior if it ends up 
> the default behavior instead of e.g. a toggle. Maybe worthy of a major 
> version bump for next release if that is the plan?

A not-so-brief aside here, having had a chance to stop and ruminate on 
the landscape of FOSS and nano's place in it. When thinking about the 
change introduced by this patch I had to stop and think: hey, there are 
potentially many thousands of people who will eventually be affected by 
this, it's a big deal! I never really gave much thought to it. But it's 
worth taking a minute to say it: like hey, guys & gals - we actually did 
it, this is a great problem to have, how awesome is that?

Every time I read a guide online for setting up a service in Linux, or 
stumble on a reddit thread about "edit this file to fix that", or a 
YouTube howto video, I already know what editor they're going to say to 
use for anyone starting out with Linux. And it's not vim, it's not 
emacs. It's nano. I used to get a shiver when I'd see it, but it is just 
absolutely commonplace nowadays. Just amazing think about. My heartfelt 
thanks to especially Benno for all his efforts, and everyone who got us 
where we are today.

Remembering when I had to mess around with trying to navigate editing my 
XF86Config in Slackware back in 1997 using Pico, I could not have 
possibly have envisioned that imagined something like nano would become 
as popular as it has for the task of "just edit the file and get on with 
your life". I guess people do seem to resonate with "small and 
friendly"!

Someday there will certainly be another default recommended beginner 
editor for the console or your-preferred-x-terminal, and honestly that 
doesnt even sound bad to me, becuase I assume it'll be even better and 
more intuitive. But until then boy it's nice to say hey we helped make 
people's simple editing task easier.

Share and Enjoy!
chrisa

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