Upgrade nano to v4.3 on macOS
macOS Mojave has v2.0.6 installed whereas the latest is 4.3 at the time of this writing.
nano --version
GNU nano version 2.0.6 (compiled 19:02:51, Feb 22 2019)
Email: nano@nano-editor.org Web: http://www.nano-editor.org/
Compiled options: --disable-nls --enable-color --enable-extra --enable-multibuffer --enable-nanorc --enable-utf8
Use Homebrew to install nano
# install Homebrew
/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
# use Homebrew to install nano
brew install nano
If you check the version now, it’ll still show 2.0.6 because by default it uses the system version. The brew version is here: /usr/local/Cellar/nano/4.3/bin/nano
/usr/local/Cellar/nano/4.3/bin/nano --version
GNU nano, version 4.3
(C) 1999-2011, 2013-2019 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
(C) 2014-2019 the contributors to nano
Email: nano@nano-editor.org Web: https://nano-editor.org/
Compiled options: --disable-libmagic --enable-utf8
Link to the right version
To make sure the Brew version of nano is run every time, you can:
- symlink the bin file
- or add it as an alias
- or add it to \$PATH
ln -s /usr/local/Cellar/nano/4.3/bin/nano /usr/local/bin/nano
# ~/.aliases or ~/.bash_profile
alias nano=/usr/local/Cellar/nano/4.3/bin/nano
# ~/.bash_profile
export PATH="/usr/local/Cellar/nano/4.3/bin/nano:$PATH"