Bind Ctrl+Right to nextword in nano (as it is in all other apps)

Question

And likewise Ctrl+Left to prevword. I read the man page of nanorc and found

bind key function menu

So the line bind ^Left prevword main would be what I want, the problem is that nano only accepts

an alpha character or the word "Space"

so Left doesn't exist.

Is there a way to accomplish this? Right now I'm on natty (nano 2.2.2) but I will upgrade nano if a later (devel?) version can do this.

Answer 1

Sadly, I don't think this is possible. I've found a thread where a nano developer said:

Hi, I've searched high and low trying to find out if it's possible to navigate through the text with CTRL left/right-key to jump word by word...

Unfortunately, no. Meta-Space and Ctrl-Space are the only keys to do that. This is because in text mode, there's no way for nano to tell the difference between Ctrl-Left and Left and between Ctrl-Right and Right.

On another, he added:

because I figure that nano should work the same way under both X terminals and the console, and I have yet to find a console that can distinguish between [arrow key] and Ctrl-[arrow key]. I do wish that wasn't the case...

Answer 2

There is a solution to this problem. Redefine Ctrl-Left and Ctrl-Right in your Terminal program to seldom-used keys, such as F13 and F14.

Then in ~/.nanorc:

bind F13 prevword main
bind F14 nextword main

Now, a shortcoming, for me at least, is that it will only work when you're using the Terminal program you used for the key redefinition. For example, in my situation, this doesn't work when I'm at the physical console of my OS (in my case, FreeBSD). But I use QVT/Term from my desktop in the other room almost 100% of the time. Works like a charm.

Answer 3

I don't have a direct answer, but this problem is what prompted me to study vim; as many linux pros will tell you, nothing beats vim. After a few months of practice, I believe they are right. I used to hate vim because I didn't know how to use it, and preferred nano, simply because it was more like notepad. Now, nano seems pretty useless to me. So, my answer is:

sudo apt-get install vim
vimtutor

Hope that isn't an unwelcome suggestion; I can't but think you'll appreciate it in the long run (the feature you are looking to implement is built into vim by default).