To make the nano text editor nicer to use for development, you can change the tab size to 4 spaces, set it to convert tabs to spaces, make it always display line and character numbers and enable multiple file buffers. Since I always forget how, here are the settings that go in the ~/.nanorc file:
set tabsize 4 set tabstospaces set const set multibuffer
The multiple file buffer feature is really useful, as you can load multiple files with CTRL+R and quickly switch between them with ESC follow by > or <.
Sometimes you need hard tabs (in a Makefile for example). To achieve this, the -I flag can be used to ignore the .nanorc file for Makefiles:
nano -I Makefile