Improved Nano Syntax Highlighting Files

This repository holds {lang}.nanorc files that have improved definitions of syntax highlighting for various languages.

This repository is forked from github.com/scopatz/nanorc after almost 2 years of no activity from the maintainer.

Installation

There are three ways to install this repo.

1. Automatic installer

Copy the following code to download and run the installer script:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/galenguyer/nano-syntax-highlighting/master/install.sh | bash

If your machine doesn't have curl command, use this code:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/galenguyer/nano-syntax-highlighting/master/install.sh -O- | bash

This automatically unpacks all the .nanorc files to ~/.nano.

Note

Some syntax definitions which exist in Nano upstream may be preferable to the ones provided by this package. The install.sh script may be run with -l or --lite to insert the included syntax definitions from this package with lower precedence than the ones provided by the standard package.

2. Package managers

As this is a fork, it is not (yet) available in any official repositories.

3. Clone repo (copy the files)

The files should be placed inside of the ~/.nano/ directory.

You may put the files to a different directory, for example to ~/.nano/nanorc/. For readability, we use $install_path to represent the path of your choice (in system wide the path is always /usr/share/nano-syntax-highlighting/).

For single user, run:

git clone git@github.com:galenguyer/nano-syntax-highlighting.git $install_path
- or with HTTPS: git clone https://github.com/galenguyer/nano-syntax-highlighting.git $install_path
and then switch to the suitable branch: $install_path/tool/switch-branch.sh

For system wide, run:

sudo git clone https://github.com/galenguyer/nano-syntax-highlighting.git $install_path
$install_path/tool/switch-branch.sh

Configuration

After installation, you need to inform nano to used the new highlight files. The configuration file is located at ~/.nanorc, for users, and at /etc/nanorc, for system wide. If this file doesn't exist, create a new one.

Again there are three ways:

1. Include all

Append the content of the folder in one line, with wildcard:

echo "include $install_path/*.nanorc" >> ~/.nanorc or echo "include $install_path/*.nanorc" >> /etc/nanorc

2. Include/append our `nanorc` file

Simply run:

cat $install_path/nanorc >> ~/.nanorc or cat $install_path/nanorc >> /etc/nanorc

3. One by one

Add your preferable languages one by one into the file. For example:

## C/C++
include "~/.nano/c.nanorc"

Tricks & Tweaks

MacOS

\< and \> are regular character escapes on MacOS. The bug is fixed in Nano, but this might be a problem if you are using an older version If this is the case, replace them respectively with [[:<:]] and [[:>:]]. This is reported in Issue 52.

Why not include the original files?

Good question! It's due to the way that nano reads the files, the regex instructions should be in a specific order which is evident in some nanorc files. And if we use the include or extendsyntax commands, the colors or other things may not work as expected. The best way to make changes is by copying and editing the original files. Please see this issue. But if some original nanorc file needs an update, feel free to patch it!

My shortcut is not working!

Please see this issue.

Acknowledgements

Some of these files are derived from the original Nano editor repo

galenguyer/nano-syntax-highlighting