Howto fix the backspace problem on nano editor via SSH

Written byBy: Mario Rimann.

Whenever I have to edit a file on a remote server I do that with nano. But since I have a MacBook, working on nano while beeing connected to our Debian based server via SSH drove me nuts:

Hitting the backspace button on my keyboard resulted in deleting stuff from the wrong side of the cursor - acting like a delete key instead of the backspace key. This only happened from Mac based systems - connecting to the same server from any other system worked. And also writing/deleting on the shell and in other applications on the server always worked - just not in nano.

With a bit of searching I found the following blog entry: "terminal + ssh question"

The solution

Add the following line to your /etc/nanorc file (to have it for all users), or locally in your home directory into ~/.nanorc file:

set rebinddelete

Additional change

Most of the time I used nano with the command line switch -w to disable wrapping of long lines. Sometimes I forgot the switch and then had to close nano and start over. You can just add the following line to the same file as mentioned above. This will pre-set the -w switch automatically.

set nowrap