Git commit message highlighting in nano

› Code Snippets › Git commit message highlighting in nano

Sat, 11/24/2012 - 16:07

For those who use nano as their CLI editor of choice: Here’s a syntax highlighting file for Git commit messages which also supports the special KDE commit hook keywords.

##  syntax highlighting for git commit messages of KDE projects
syntax "patch" ".git/COMMIT_EDITMSG$"
 
# overlong lines
color brightred "^.{70,}.+$"
 
# KDE commit hook keywords, see: http://community.kde.org/Sysadmin/GitKdeOrgManual#Commit_hook_keywords
color yellow "^(FEATURE|BUG|CCBUG|FIXED-IN|CCMAIL|REVIEW|GUI|DIGEST):.*$"
color yellow "(SVN_SILENT|GIT_SILENT|SVN_MERGE)"
 
# comment
color blue "^#.*$"
 
# special comment lines
color green "^# Changes to be committed:"
color red "^# Changes not staged for commit:"
color brightblue "^# Untracked files:"
color brightblue "^# On branch .+$"
color brightblue "^# Your branch is ahead of .+$"
 
# diff files
# meh - cannot match against \t ... should be: ^#\t.*$
color cyan "^#[^ a-zA-Z0-9][^ ].*$"

Just put this file as gitcommit.nanorc or similar somewhere on your disk and load it from your .nanorc or even /etc/nanorc like this:

include "/path/to/gitcommit.nanorc"

Screenshot of highlighted git commit message

Comments

It’s news to me that nano has Sat, 11/24/2012 - 20:53 — Nicolas (not verified)

It’s news to me that nano has syntax highlighting.

Take a look at the bottom of Sat, 11/24/2012 - 21:57 — Milian Wolff

Take a look at the bottom of /etc/nanorc and the files available in /usr/share/nano/ and on the web (including my website).

Cheers

Merci, it is possible to Sat, 11/24/2012 - 17:31 — christoph (not verified)

Merci, it is possible to alert the user, if the second line is not empty?

Afaik not, since nano Sat, 11/24/2012 - 21:58 — Milian Wolff

Afaik not, since nano highlighting is done on a line-by-line basis. Thus I cannot figure out on which line I am…

I’d be happy to be proven wrong though, esp. if that would mean we could also add a special highlighting for the very first line.