When I ask for man nano, I get a man page for pico, which offers "-w Disable word wrap (thus allow editing of long lines)."
So when I run nano in MacOS 13.2.1, it really runs pico (which seems to have the opposite behavior to proper nano in this regard), even though:
% which nano
/usr/bin/nano
@peterdrake @jupiter Have you tried "man pico" to see if there's a man page for it? Pico was the basis for Nano.
@peterdrake @jupiter Since I don't know much about Macs, the only other thing I can suggest would be to check Homebrew to see if there's anything they can help with.
Actually, I just checked. There is a listing for nano, but I don't have any idea what to do from there.
https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/nano
I hope this helps in some manner.
@peterdrake Is there not a config option for this?
@trinsec Yes, you can get the desired behavior with either a command-line flag or a config file. I was just surprised to see this as the default.
@peterdrake I'm not. I'm sure many users might want to just edit a textfile, then nowrap is kind of an inconvenience.
@trinsec If you're editing prose paragraphs, TextEdit might be a more natural choice. Soft wrapping could also be a reasonable compromise.
What's really surprising is that, according to the responses, this nano has the *opposite* behavior of nano on other platforms.
@peterdrake I don't know about macOS, but on Linux I've always had in my ~/.sh_aliases (I use same aliases for both BASH and Zsh) a line that says:
alias nano="nano -w"
According to the man page (man nano) on Arch Linux, no-wrap is default:
https://man.archlinux.org/man/nano.1#w
-w, --nowrap
Do not automatically hard-wrap the current line when it becomes overlong. This is the default. (This option is the opposite of -b (--breaklonglines) -- the last one given takes effect.)