At some point your going to update, install, or modify something then the next time you reboot WHAM! no pretty graphical desktop just that awful console with errors. Nine chances out of ten you will have to edit some configuration file. I will walk you through the basics of using nano, debian linux and most all distobutions default text editor. If you dont have nano use pico, they are much the same.

First start nano by typing nano. Or if you know the file you need to edit type nano filename. I will take it to be you know the file and you are now in a screen similiar to the one below.

You are proababily on a similiar screen that you see above, because most of the graphical problems with linux is with this file. You can see what file you are currently editing by the top center, in this case "/usr/X11/xorg.conf". In the main body of the program you see the text of the file and at the bottom the most commonly used commands.

From here you can use your arrow keys to navigate up down left and right. At the end of some of the lines you may see a $, this is to show you that the line goes further than the screen width and you will have to scroll to the right in order to see the rest of it.

Now you can do what you normally do with any text editor, be it erase, modify, or enter new text. If you are looking for something specific you can use ctrl+W and type in a word or two to find it in the current document. This becomes really handy if the file is several pages long. When your done editing the file you can ctrl+O to save the file, or ctrl+X to exit, which will ask you to save changes before you totally close out the program.

Create a test file and use nano to edit it, play around with the other commands such as justify, cut text, paste, etc. Although sometimes cryptic, nano isnt as hard to learn as it seems, and knowing even the basic of commands in it can certainly get you out of a troubles.