In the early days of Unix, sorry Windows, a tool called Pine was utilized for emails and reading Usenet groups. Pine was created by the University of Washington in March 1992. Pico (Pine composer), a text editor, is a tool that allowed users to compose messages in Pine. This suite of tools was quintessential during the 90’s as it provided users within an easy to use interface.

With the birth of the Debian GNU/Linux project in 1993 and the Debian manifesto in 1994, the ushering of ‘free software’ was well underway. Many uses were perplexed when the binary files for Pine and Pico were not included in these distros. Also, many users, were confused by the cryptic licensing of Pine and Pico.

In 1999, an engineer by the name of Chris Allegretta, was less than pleased with current licensing that Pico was distributed under. After a weekend spent coding and hacking, a project written in C was born called TIP (This Isn’t Pico). TIP was a clone or fork of the Pico project. TIP included additional functionality that Pico lacked such as search and replace, go to line and column number, spell check and auto indentation.

On January 10, 2000, the TIP project was officially renamed to Nano due to namespace conflicts with a Unix command program called ‘tip’. In February 2001, Nano was declared an official program by Richard Stallman. Nano first production release was on March 22, 2001. As of this writing the current version is 2.7.4 released January 10, 2017.

The command line is your best friend as an engineer and nano’s simplicity lowers the barriers to entry when text editing at your terminal compared to its more advanced companions vi(m) and emacs. Nano is installed by default on most Linux distros including MacOS. Just type nano followed by a file name and off you go.

Happy Coding.