nano only opens the first file given on the command line

Question

Setting up a new MacBook. I like to use pico, so I always remember to add

export EDITOR=nano
alias pico=nano
alias pcio=nano
alias pioc=nano

to my .profile. But I'm still missing something that I used to have, because whenever I launch nano with multiple command-line arguments, instead of opening each file in sequence, it only opens the first filename.

nano x.txt y.txt # edits x.txt and then quits!

This isn't how it behaved on my old machine. What's the fix? (Is there an environment variable to make nano open multiple files?)

Answer 1

macOS nowadays ships with a very old version of pico, instead of nano, by default. (pico doesn't even recognize the standard -v or --version arguments; it treats them as filenames.)

$ which nano
/usr/bin/nano
$ /usr/bin/nano -version
Pico 5.09
$ man /usr/share/man/man1/nano.1
[...]
Syntax
       pico [ options ] [ file ]
[...]

The solution is simply to install a (much) newer version of nano. The easiest way is brew install nano. Or without Homebrew, see this question. After brew install nano, I see:

$ which nano
/opt/homebrew/bin/nano
$ nano --version
 GNU nano, version 7.2
 (C) 2023 the Free Software Foundation and various contributors
 Compiled options: --disable-libmagic --enable-utf8
$ man nano
[...]
SYNOPSIS
       nano [options] [[+line[,column]] file]...
   nano [options] [[+[crCR](/|?)string] file]...

[...]

which indicates (truthfully) that nano 7.2 supports multiple filenames on the command line. That's all it took!