Fw: nano key bindings

[Chris Allegretta]

Hello folks,

This email from Donnie (albeit somewhat rudely expressed) does hit on something I've been feeling for awhile - I have indeed also been doing more and more editing on virtual machines in a tab of my browser, and I suspect many other folks have been dealing with being bitten by closing their window as nano's default primary search binding continues to be ^W.

We do also have F6 as a default to accomplish this, but ironically that also is difficult (but not by any teams impossible) to hit on a modern laptop keyboard as it usually ends up being Function+a key which is in a slightly different place on each kb. I would ideally suggest ^F , but it has served as 'move forward' for ages now, though I truly wonder how many folks have ever hit that key combination).

How would folks feel about using Meta+F as the primary search keystroke (i.e. the one advertised on the help menu) with ^W and F6 as equivalents? It does line up nicely with M-W as re-search. Any feedback appreciated.

------- Forwarded Message -------
From: Donnie Ferris <DonnyBahama@gmx.com>
Date: On Wednesday, January 11th, 2023 at 2:05 PM
Subject: nano key bindings
To: bensberg@telfort.nl <bensberg@telfort.nl>, chrisa@asty.org <chrisa@asty.org>

Hello,

 

The Ctrl+W key binding is utterly egregious. Every time I (forget and) try to search for text, it closes my browser tab and I lose EVERYTHING. I would like to change the key bindings so that they are more standard - Ctrl+C to copy, Ctrl+X to cut, Ctrl+V to paste, Ctrl+F to find text, etc.

 

I'm not a C/C++ programmer, but this has happened one too many times  One of these days, the blood pressure spike is going to kill me. I'd like to try changing the key bindings (and the text at the bottom that lists the most common ones) and compile from the modified source. I'm hoping I can make sense enough of the code to pull this off. Can you please point me in the right direction? nano.c seemed like the logical place to start but when I (opened it in xed and) searched for "binding" then (when nothing was found) "justify", I didn't find anything that seemed to be what I'm looking for.

 

Thanks for your time and consideration.

 

~ Donnie