Package: nano
Version: 2.0.7-4
[Summary: please change the nano default so that it does not hard-wrap
lines by default, whether or not it is running as root.]
nano is the default text editor on Debian, and for good reason. It
provides a friendly interface to new users, while it is lightweight enough
to be suitable for a variety of quick tasks, even among power users who
forgot how to use vi and don’t want to wait for Emacs to load. But nano
comes with a single broken default setting that I need to override in
order for it to be useful for most of these tasks: it automatically
hard-wraps long lines to the width of the screen by inserting newline
characters.
This default is inherited from the editor pico, which is the basis for
nano’s UI. pico is part of the PINE (now Alpine) email client, where
wrapping makes some amount of sense. But if I’m editing anything other
than paragraphs of text, these newlines are annoying at best, and likely
to corrupt the syntax of my file at worst.
In an attempt to address this issue, Debian patches nano and configures it
with the --disable-wrapping-as-root option, on the theory that wrapping is
most likely to corrupt files you might commonly edit as root (#135978).
But in my experience (which I’m sure is not unique), those same
considerations also apply to most files one would commonly edit as a
normal user. Many programs that you can configure in /etc/foo as root can
also be configured in ~/.foo by a normal user, to say nothing of any other
non-mail text files that the user wants to work on.
It is, while annoying, not too difficult to train oneself to use the nano
-w flag all the time to disable wrapping. However, Debian uses nano as
the defult editor (through the sensible-editor mechanism that ends up
looking at /etc/alternatives/editor -> /usr/bin/nano) for many operations
where there is no opportunity to pass flags directly to the editor.
For example, sudo -e allows the user to edit a file with root permissions
by invoking their editor _as themself_ on a temporary buffer. Even though
you can use sudo -e to edit any file that could be accessed by running
nano as root (which would disable wrapping), the nano invoked by sudo -e
will use wrapping by default. Other examples that come to mind include
crontab -e (LP #261495), and many VCS commands, a particularly nasty case
being git rebase --interactive.
Thus the user, if they have not already moved on to a different $EDITOR by
this point, has no choice but to figure out how to disable wrapping in
nano by default. They eventually learn that they need to turn on “set
nowrap” in their ~/.nanorc or /etc/nanorc. This is an acceptable solution
for them, until they log into a different Debian or Ubuntu system and find
that they need to reconfigure nano again.
If everyone has to change the default setting to get a useful editor, then
the default is wrong and should be changed in Debian. Either nano should
be configured with --disable-wrapping instead of
--disable-wrapping-as-root, or the Debian default /etc/nanorc should have
“set nowrap” uncommented.
(The latter solution has the advantage that the user could “unset nowrap”
in their ~/.nanorc if they so desired. Though I have a hard time
imagining why anyone finds this behavior useful, especially when ^J can
already be used to wrap a paragraph as needed.)
