New to Linux
 

I am an old photographer so the name has NO implications concerning what you might think. I am, however, brand spanking new to Linux and seem to have a mysterious curiosity about CentOS and/or Ubuntu. I am here because this adventure is so new that I am floundering after thinking this should be a quick learn. ;0)
I now have about my 55th server (I lost count) running at Linode and feel that I am not as smart as I am old. I suppose the first thing I need to understand is why I have so much problem copy/pasting on either OS using Nano. AS I looked up vi I just knew that I needed some friendly help or I will soon be on my one thousandth server attempt. For now, Nano is great so that I understand that C/P problem I have. Any suggestions shall be received with joy! Oh yes, I use a late 2014 iMac. It is up to date and raring to go.

Hopefully you have looked at the help - "^G" down the bottom. That's <Ctrl>-g in nano-speak. Where you see "M-6" for example that means <Alt>-6 - them's the meta keys.
As always a good search engine is your friend - have a read of this - even mentions a fix for Macs that appear not to have an <Alt> key.

Welcome to LQ.

You might want to check out goinglinux.com. There's a wealth of articles and information there. When I first discovered their podcast along about episode 100-something, I went back and listened to them all from episode one on. I haven't missed an episode since.

And building on what syg00 said, I've found that including the word "linux" (or sometimes the name of the Linux distro) in a search string makes search results much more useful.

Because of the background context "photographer", I wonder how nano came to be your common context in which to copy or paste. The photographers I know are heavily into KDE or Windows and DarkTable or Photoshop. I do most copy/paste operations via keyboard, very often without GUI running, while I watch most others use some sort of rodent. What other context can you provide, such as current distro or DE/WM?

Hopefully the OP is just interested in some notes. Adjusting colour curves in nano just wasn't on my horizon when I read it.

What others already said, plus:
Do you have your mouse handy when using nano?
Then the equivalent of Ctrl-C is simply highlighting the text with your mouse, and the equivalent of Ctrl-V is either a middle mouse click or Shift-Ins.

If you want to learn vi, I suggest gvim. vim is "vi improved" and is much easier to use. For example it allows the use of the navigation keys on your keyboard and it shows at the bottom of the screen when you are in INPUT or REPLACE mode. gvim adds a graphical interface to vim, so you can use familiar icons for things like cut and paste while learning the vim commands that will do it much faster.

vi is a child of the 70's.
Leave it there.

If you are talking about vi itself, I concur. It's a museum piece. But don't knock the whole vi family. gvim is a lovely editor: it gives beginners a small selection of useful graphical operations while providing more experienced editors with a load of very powerful internal commands, it does syntax checking, and it has very few dependencies compared with something like gedit. It even ships with a set of internal icons so that it doesn't strictly depend on gtk, although it looks a lot prettier with gtk.

I struggle with VIM a little as far as copy/paste. It never seems to always work for me. I’ll have to try gvim. Never knew it was a thing!

As far as editors go, generally I use Geany, which is available for both CentOS and Ubuntu.

I use geany for programming. It makes a wonderful ide. But it seems a bit of a heavyweight for a general editor.

@oldphot: did you kick off YAED (yet another editor discussion)? :mad:
Only joking.
Also, butterflies.

I use vi/vim all the time, but as I'm nearly always using a laptop with xterm or similar, I just copy/paste via the GUI that's running the term program.

You can learn yank & put etc if you really want to, but these days it's unusual to be on a physical console.

Vi/vim is great for those of us who started out on a console, nano is an easy editor to use, if it does everything you need. :)

Use what is available.