Comment by xp84 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xp84 | Hacker News Reader

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I appreciate that and will be forever grateful to you personally from now on when I hit ^S, but I just never thought to search the Help for it, since I figured something so critical would surely not have been omitted from the footer menu if it existed!

Let's just take a moment to appreciate what is apparently more important than the happy-path activity of saving your file:

  ^G Get Help  ^O WriteOut  ^R Read File ^Y Prev Pg   ^K Cut Text  ^C Cur Pos   
  ^X Exit      ^J Justify   ^W Where is  ^V Next Pg   ^U UnCut Text^T To Spell

Of these, I to this day have no idea what ^J, ^C, and ^T would even do. Who the heck tries to justify text in a plaintext editor? Lol.

* ^J is not very useful, it combines a block of lines into a single line.

* ^T requires a spell checker to be installed. I get: Error invoking "spell", even though I have aspell, gspell, hspell, huspell, hunspell and also nuspell installed. Who knows how to configure this.

* ^C outputs information about the current cursor position, but "Cur Pos" is not a helpful description.

To be fair, I just discovered that many(all?) of the commands listed in ^G (help) are actually in the footer menu, but the menu is truncated to what available space is available on 2 rows × char width. Save is positioned very far to the right as the last item.

According to nano, the rationale of the order is:

> "The bottom two lines show the most commonly used shortcuts in the editor."

I still use ^O a lot due to heuristics of reading a file X, to use as a template for a new file Y (think nginx server block). The intent to use ^O, in those cases, actually precedes firing up nano.

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