Dear Nano: You know I love you. You are the GPL’d heir to the old UW-Pine-derived Pico editor, my text-editing savior when I was unceremoniously thrust onto the Unix command line early in my computer science education and told to write a program.

However, clever error messages may seem funny to you but are actually aggravating to the end user due to their failure to actually articulate what went wrong:

This is not helpful when a user is trying to be productive and honestly has no idea what misstep just occurred. Fortunately, I have been using using GNU Nano long enough to know that “Come on, be reasonable” usually means that, rather than pressing Ctrl-W to search for text, I mistakenly pressed Ctrl-/ (go to line number) and entered a non-numeric value.

I wonder if non-English-speaking users have to put up with the same error message? Using my limited ability to interpret non-English languages, I delved into the .po files in the Nano source. Well, what do you know?

de.po:

msgid "Come on, be reasonable"
msgstr "Komm schon, sei vernünftig"

fr.po:

msgid "Come on, be reasonable"
msgstr "Allez, soyez raisonnable"

it.po:

msgid "Come on, be reasonable"
msgstr "Avanti, sii ragionevole"

This is especially egregious since “come on” is literally translated and I doubt that the idiom has the same connotation in other languages.

Thankfully, a brief perusal of the other msgid strings does not immediately reveal any other unintuitive errors. As a bonus, I just figured out that Nano must have a bracket-matching feature due the presence of such strings as “Not a bracket” and “No matching bracket”.