Re: Help Line Text

On February 21, 2020 12:55:29 PM EST, "[email protected]" <[email protected]> wrote:
>By the way, what exactly do I need to type into the .nanorc file to
>rebind something to the escape key?

I think escape might not be bindable.

On Fri, 21 Feb 2020 at 3:39 pm, Benno Schulenberg<[email protected]>
wrote:   
>>In which order would you prefer to see the shortcuts in the help lines?
>>And for whom?  How would this be helpful?
On February 21, 2020 12:55:29 PM EST, "[email protected]" <[email protected]> wrote:
>As for reordering the shortcuts and perhaps displaying different ones
>in different orders in the help lines, I thought it would be nice to
>only display the shortcuts I rarely use there.

I think it would be best to display the shortcuts that are used the most often. Nano's reputation is one of user-friendliness, after all.
[Micro](https://github.com/zyedidia/micro),
a contemporary of nano, shows the following shortcuts:

```
^Q Quit, ^S Save, ^O Open, ^G Help, ^E Command Bar, ^K Cut Line
^F Find, ^Z Undo, ^Y Redo, ^A Select All, ^D Duplicate Line, ^T New Tab
```

With the exception of 'new tab', 'command bar', 'select all', and 'duplicate line', this set would be good to move up in nano. (Note that ^S here is save, and not 'writeout' -- which is more commonly called 'save as'). I also recommend showing copy and paste.

(Regarding nano's current top commands, I've never once intentionally used the shortcut for replace, or justify. I use nano as my primary text editor for writing code.)

Which leads to the next part: how can we remember how to trigger 'spellcheck' or 'linter' or the other commands that we'll never memorize the shortcut for?

Currently, I press `^G /`, then start typing the command's name, and after seeing it, Q then trigger the shortcut.
Most OS's offer a shortcut to search thru menu items. Github's popular Atom editor provides the 'command pallette' (shift control p) to search through commands.
Micro has the 'command bar' (annoyingly mapped to ^E, IMO) which offers tab completion, so I can run the linter with `^E li <TAB> <ENTER>`.

-Zach