Nano

The current version of nano living on DreamHost is 1.2.4, this guide will help you to upgrade to the latest version.

Getting the source

Go to http://www.nano-editor.org to download the latest source. Place it somewhere smart.. I use $HOME/src.

Next untar the archive:


# tar zfxv nano-2.x.x.tar.gz

This will create a folder with the same name as the file.

Enter the folder that you just untarred the source to. Run configure with the --prefix and --enable-all parameter like this:


# ./configure --prefix=$HOME --enable-all

This tells the compiler that you want all the bells and whistles, and you want to install in your own folder.

Next run


# make; make install

You now have nano installed in $HOME/bin/nano

You need to edit your .bash_profile file to include your own bin directory first in the path. The easiest way of doing this is:


# cd ~
# echo "export PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH" >> .bash_profile

You probably need to log in and out to make the new PATH directive work.

Then you can try running nano -V. It should tell you the correct version (2.x.x) and not 1.2.4