Version 5.5 brought the option --minibar, for a minimized user interface, and version 5.6 brought the spotlighting of a search match, in black on yellow by default. Subsequent versions added a few minor things and fixed some bugs.
Version 5.0 brought: direct access to the "Execute Command" prompt, the ability to place and jump to anchors, the --indicator option for showing a kind of scrollbar, nine new color names plus the "italic" attribute, and several major internal changes. Versions 5.1 and 5.2 then fixed the bugs that these changes had caused along the way.
This version breaks with the close compatibility with Pico: nano no longer hard-wraps the current line by default when it becomes overlong, and uses smooth scrolling by default, plus two other minor changes. Further, in 3.0 indenting and unindenting became undoable, and now, with 4.0, also justifications have become undoable (to any depth), making that all of the user's actions are now undoable and redoable (with the M-U and M-E keystrokes).
Accumulated changes over the last five releases include: the ability to bind a key to a string (text and/or escape sequences), a default color of bright white on red for error messages, an improvement to the way the Scroll-Up and Scroll-Down commands work, and the new --afterends option to make Ctrl+Right (next word) stop at the end of a word instead of at the beginning. Check it out.
The most important change in this version is that now you can use <Tab> to indent a marked region and <Shift+Tab> to unindent it. Furthermore, with the option 'set trimblanks' in your nanorc, nano will now snip those pesky trailing spaces when automatic hard-wrapping occurs (when using the --fill option, for example). Apart from those things, there are several small fixes and improvements. Recommended upgrade.
This version brings the ability to do softwrapping at whitespace (via the option --atblanks on the command line or 'set atblanks' in your nanorc, together with the softwrap option). Apart from that new feature, just a few tiny fixes.
This version makes the built-in help texts searchable (with ^W). This is useful chiefly in the main help text -- when the user forgot how to scroll without moving the cursor, for example, or how to insert a keystoke verbatim. Apart from that, this release fixes a few small or unlikely bugs.
This version of nano changes the way softwrap works: the <Up> and <Down> cursor keys now move through visual rows instead of jumping between logical lines. And nano now makes use of gnulib, to get rid of some custom shims and to avoid the need for new ones. The use of gnulib has increased the size of nano's tarball by some thirty percent, but... in lines of code this is the smallest nano since 2.2.0.
After 2.7.1 bringing line numbers, this version brings a word completion feature (bound to Ctrl+] by default) and also fixes a few small bugs. So... there is no need to upgrade, but it won't hurt.
The first nano where you can select text by holding Shift together with the movement keys. (This doesn't work on all terminal emulators, but works fine on a Linux consolse, on an xterm, and on a Gnome Terminal. If you have problems on your terminal, maybe you can configure things differently. Otherwise, ask its developers to make those key combos configurable.)
You can now follow nano on Twitter (http://twitter.com/gnunano) or become a fan on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/pages/the-GNU-nano-text-editor/51469466761) and receive updates about recent nano releases and our recent 10 year anniversary!
GNU nano 2.0.7 was released on December 20th, 2007.
On that same day, David Lawrence Ramsey stepped down as nano's maintainer. All of us express our sincerest appreciation to David for his years of dedication and contributions to the project, and wish him the best. I'm sure he will be the same asset to future project that he was to nano; the program would not be what it is today without him.
All major nano contributors have transferred their copyright to the Free Software Foundation. This does not mean nano is defunct, but development will likely be slower in the future without David's talented fingers.
In the last week I have begun implementing some of the last big wish list items for nano. New code to re-bind the shortcut keys was committed to HEAD a few days ago; after that becomes more stable a more generalized undo feature is next on the list.
We are also going to be migrating the CVS tree to a new version control system, hopefully subversion, in the near future. Thank you again for using our little editor.