[Help-nano] Columns and Rows upon invocation of nano

[no tellin]

I'm in the process of upgrading/converting a Universe system from an Aviion DG to an IBM based platform.

We have need to invoke an editor from within Universe to edit files at the (ba)sh level. The editor I want to invoke is nano for a variety of reasons. These include simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. My users much prefer simple and easy to use. For that matter, so do I.

The environment is the Accuterm terminal emulator running on Windows in WYSE-50 AddsViewpoint emulation mode. The new computer is running RHEL 5 with the available version of nano being 1.3.12.

When I invoke nano, the screen doesn't display the top line until I hit a key. When I enter text, the cursor moves down one line for each character for the first 8 chars then goes back to the correct line and continues entering text correctly thereafter.

Like so:

This is only a test.
T
Th
Thi
This
This i
This is
This is o

Performing the ctl-commands messed up the bottom part of the screen.

If I use JOE instead, the top line gets messed up (it's too long and therefore wraps to the second line) but everything seems to function as expected. With JOE, I can invoke JOE with -columns 132 and this takes care of the line wrap in the top line.

My immediate questions are two:

1) Is there a way to invoke nano from the bash command line and force the screen size setting?

2) Would a statically compiled version of nano-2.0.7 be a realistic option? I can't install the 2.0.6.4 version of nano from FC8 because of libtinfo.so.5 dependency issues. i.e. I'm not a liberty to mess with such basic items as system wide versions of ncurses etc. The overhead of statically compiled packages are not a problem in this case. The new computer is approximately 60Xs faster overall than the old one. If statically compiled nano would work, could someone walk me through it? I have access to several Gentoo boxes if that helps.

Thanks for any assistance.