Nano

Text editors are amongst the first living proof that convinced everyone a computer holds a lot of potential. Nowadays, these can be found to suit any need, come in different styles, with free or paid licenses. Amongst the basic types, Nano gives you the means to write down notes or text strings of interest and save under different formats.

Probably the application's only advantage is portability. From the moment you finished downloading it, you can leave it stored on a USB Flash drive to use on the go if it tickles your fancy. With minimum impact on system resources and registries, it's sure to come in handy for quickly taking notes.

Since it's a text editor, disappointment starts to slowly make its presence noticeable through the interface that resembles an instance of command prompt. It actually is, reducing all your effort to working with the keyboard through text and corresponding commands for different functions.

All operations you can performed are enlisted at the bottom, one of which fills the screen with helpful documentation. The set is rather poor, with options to open or save files, copy, cut and paste, justify or jump to a specific line. Although mostly guided, the whole experience can take a lot of getting used to.

You can forget all about character formatting or text arrangement. There are no options in this regard, with post processing requiring you to use other tools, thus putting the whole practicality under the question mark. More frustration is created by the fixed window size that makes it difficult to view large documents, especially with no mouse support for scrolling.

To sum it up, Nano is a simple text editor that just seems to be caught in the wrong era. It's a little more than just writing letters in a command prompt environment but it's difficult to manage for handling text, with no mouse support and ambiguous to sometimes frustrating methods of managing content. There's also no support for programming, or at least syntax highlighting, further dragging down practicality to the point of no return.