When I’m messing around with config files on the command line my editor of choice is Nano. It’s simple, fast and pretty much straight forward. You don’t have to learn any commands and can use keyboard shortcuts just like in GUI programs.
Settings
Today I had a look on the project website and saw that there are tons of settings which I really missed before. Just have a look into your /etc/nanorc for a default config file with all settings and their default values. Here are those I like most:
- smooth (scrolling)
- autoindent
- mouse (though I use it rarely)
- smarthome
- tabsize (8 is far to much, I love 4)
Syntax Highlighting
Yes! Nano supports syntax highlighting! And I never knew it, but heck - it’s never to late. Not for neat features like this one, though I really wonder why this is not activated by default…
In the aforementioned /etc/nanorc are already some default languages which just wait to be commented out. You might also want to have a look into /usr/share/nano, there are some languages you can include in your nanorc file with:
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Your favourite syntax highlighter for web applications, GeSHi, recently got some new features and bug fixes. By yours sincerely. A rough summary of what I contributed:
- various performance improvements, i.e. some speed optimizations and reduced memory consumptions (especially peak memory usage is down by roughly 1MB when highlighting
geshi.php by itself) - minor bugfixes, including one which prevents some nasty PHP notices on PHP 5 systems to contaminate your precious log files
- improved language files: bash, apache
- added language files: GNU Gettext, Xorg configuration and Apt
sources.list
Some of those features were already shipped with the recent 1.0.7.22 release. But the two new language files and the improvements to the existing apache language file are currently only available via SVN. Wait for the next stable release which should be 1.0.8.
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And here another syntax file for Nano. This time it highlights the /etc/apt/sources.list:
## syntax highlighting for /etc/apt/sources.list
syntax "apt/sources.list" "sources\.list(\.old|~)?$"
# component
color brightmagenta "^deb(-src)? ((http|file|ftp):/[^ ]+|cdrom:\[[^\]]+\]/|cdrom:\[[a-zA-Z0-9\._-\(\) ]+\]/) [^ ]+ .+$"
# distribution
color brightred "^deb(-src)? ((http|file|ftp):/[^ ]+|cdrom:\[[^\]]+\]/|cdrom:\[[a-zA-Z0-9\._-\(\) ]+\]/) [^ ]+"
# URI
color brightgreen "(http|file|ftp):/[^ ]+"
# cdroms
# [^\]] does not work…
color brightgreen "cdrom:\[[a-zA-Z0-9\._-\(\) ]+\]/"
# deb / deb-src
color cyan "^deb"
color brightblue "^deb-src"
# comments
color brightyellow "#.*"
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