Heh. The backstory is rather short: I have very little artistic
talent and wanted to find a font in the Gimp that could produce a
snazzy n that I could then turn into ascii-art. The only remotely one
available for free on Linux at the time was for the Greek alphabet.
Surprisingly few people have since brought this up since I did it so
long ago, though I was well aware of the incorrectness at the time.
It seemed to me that the same people who would deride that the letter
choice as something that was super important would be the same one who
would say they would never resort to using nano anyway in favor of
their editor which had no flaws in their mind, and thus that people
who didn't mind the logo's errant origin probably wouldn't mind the
editor :-) It's worked out fairly well I must say!
That said, late this fall nano itself is turning 15 and the logo is
quite long in the tooth - according to archive.org the eta logo was
introduced on or around April 1 2001 - haha! You can see the old logo
which was also from Gimp, made from a simple included script-fu, at
http://web.archive.org/web/20010202023300/http://www.nano-editor.org/
So who thinks we should have a new logo contest to celebrate 15 years?
On 9/21/14, Benno Schulenberg <address@hidden> wrote:
On Sat, Sep 20, 2014, at 20:14, Robert Funnell wrote:
Why does nano use the Greek character eta as a logo? It gives the
impression that somebody doesn't know which Greek character it is and
thinks it corresponds to 'n'.
:)
I think that maybe... just maybe... Chris may have reserved
a really big prize for the first person to ask this question.
:)
If not, then /me is interested too in the answer.
Benno