This is going to take a little getting used to, but it seems anything I do with nano in Edgy needs -w to keep it from wrapping around in hideous arcs.
So this is a mental note:
- sudo nano -w /etc/X11/xorg.conf
- sudo nano -w /etc/apt/sources.list
- sudo nano -w /etc/fstab
- sudo nano -w /etc/network/interfaces
- sudo nano -w anything else I can think of.
A habit worth getting used to.
I’m confused. . . what exactly is the problem with just using nano? What do you mean by “hideous arcs”?
Sorry, I should have been more precise. It seems nano under Edgy (and I only say that because I didn’t seem to have this problem in Dapper or Breezy) defaults to wrap lines that extend past the right-hand screen border. As soon as you break a line with a new space, nano shifts down to the next line, sort of like a word processor would — that’s the “hideous arc.”
The problem is, if you write out the file like that, it doesn’t re-concatenate those lines. So something like, for example, an fstab file (which is very long and clumsy now that the UUID numbers are part of it) that needs to be a long straight sequence to be read properly, becomes clipped or just built wrong.
The -w option prevents nano from wrapping, and avoids miswriting those files when you’re editing them. A minor change, and probably not worth all the fuss I made over it. 🙂
Why not just make an alias?
I guess I could. It seems like one of those small habits that is worth adopting anyway, if only because it’s probably good for me.