Tag nano

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Git commit message highlighting in nano (November 24, 2012)

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][^ ].*$"

syntax highlighting for *.ini files in nano (February 27, 2011)

Use the snippet below in your ~/.nanorc or /etc/nanorc file to highlight *.ini files like php.ini in Nano.

    # ini highlighting
    syntax "ini" "\.ini(\.old|~)?$"
     
    # values
    color brightred "=.*$"
    # equal sign
    color green "="
    # numbers
    color brightblue "-?[0-9\.]+\s*($|;)"
    # ON/OFF
    color brightmagenta "ON|OFF|On|Off|on|off\s*($|;)"
    # sections
    color brightcyan "^\s*\[.*\]"
    # keys
    color cyan "^\s*[a-zA-Z0-9_\.]+"
    # comments
    color brightyellow ";.*$"

Syntax Highlighting in Nano (August 04, 2009)

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:

highlighted APT sources.list in nano (April 10, 2007)

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 "#.*"