When comparing nano vs qemacs (for quick emacs), the Slant community recommends nano for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” nano is ranked 14th while qemacs (for quick emacs) is ranked 42nd. The most important reason people chose nano is:
Nano includes only the bare minimum of functionality needed to edit documents making it very simple.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Easy to use
Nano includes only the bare minimum of functionality needed to edit documents making it very simple.
Pro Built-in cheat sheet for shortcuts
Shortcuts for common commands are shown at the bottom of the editor.
Pro Available on almost every Linux system as default
Similar to vi (vim), you can find nano on most Unix-like systems (even on Cygwin).
Pro Most of the languages supported
Syntax coloring is available for most of the programming language.
Pro Lightweight and bug free
Very stable editor that never hangs / leaks or crashes.
Pro Input methods for most (human) languages
Including e.g. Chinese.
Pro Terminal and graphics mode
Supports the terminal mode with 'qemacs -nw' and a graphics mode.
Pro Good documentation and help
- Context sensitive shortcut help on F1.
- Good online documentation.
Pro Comfortable file browser
Easy to open and manage files (dired-mode).
Pro Supports many editing modes besides text
- Hex
- HTML / CSS
- Image
- Audio/video (maybe not the most sought after mode in a text editor, but, well, it's there)
Pro Full UTF-8 support
Including bi-directional writing.
Pro Super lightweight and fast
Pro Emacs like key-bindings
Use your muscle memory if you know Emacs already.
Cons
Con Limited feature set
While nano is fine for writing blog posts or doing quick modifications, it's probably not suitable for programmers or someone who needs to work on an editor for an extensive period of time.
Con Uncommon keybindings
Nano uses a strange set of default keybindings, which is totally different than Vim, Emacs, VSCode and Sublime.
