The syntax highlighting definitions that come bundled with nano are of pretty poor quality. This is an attempt at providing a good set of accurate syntax definitions to replace and expand the defaults, as well as provide standards for syntax highlighting across file types. This project is originally based on tech4david's nano-highlight, which is in turn based on the original nanorc project (which is not maintained anymore).
Actually, syntax highlighting definitions from the original nanorc repo were not of the finest quality either, even when they were actively maintained (at least the ones changed/improved by me; although they are of course still better than the ones that come bundled with nano). Here is a brief list of what supported formats changed in this repository compared to the source one.
- Asterisk PBX configuration (both .conf and .ael)
- CronTab
- DM
- Erlang
- LogRotate configuration files
- NanorcTheme (theme files used in this project)
- /etc/group, /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow
- CSS
- HTML
- Nano configuration / syntax highlighting rules
- Nginx configuration files
- ColorTest (bogus format for testing color themes)
- JavaScript scripts
- Markdown texts
- Shell scripts
Using make install will install the syntax definitions to the
~/.nano/syntax/ directory.
To enable highlighting for all languages after installation, add the
following command to your ~/.nanorc file:
include ~/.nano/syntax/ALL.nanorc
To enable only a subset of languages, include them individually:
include ~/.nano/syntax/c.nanorc
include ~/.nano/syntax/python.nanorc
include ~/.nano/syntax/sh.nanorc
# ...
If you prefer to install to a location that all users can access, using
sudo make install-global will install to /usr/local/share/nano/.
Syntax files installed under this directory can then be included in
either /etc/nanorc or any user's personal ~/.nanorc.
Note: If your terminal text color isn't white, you'll need to
specify it when installing, using make install TEXT=color, where
color must be one of: red, green, yellow, blue, magenta,
cyan or black. These nanorc files are designed for editing files on
a console, which is usually black with white text. If you have a GUI,
you probably shouldn't be using nano.
After installation, the various source code samples in the examples/ directory can be used to check that highlighting is working correctly. If it doesn't work as expected, see the FAQ below.
All *.nanorc files are passed through mixins.sed found in the scripts/
directory, and additionally through a theme-definition system
(default.nanorctheme by default) before installation. This system allows
rules to be specified in terms of token type names or mixins, instead
of hard-coded colors.
For example, the following named rule:
TYPE: "int|bool|string"
becomes:
color brightblue "int|bool|string"
and the following "mixin":
+BOOLEAN
becomes:
color brightwhite "\<(true|false)\>"
This system helps to keep colors uniform across different languages and also to keep the definitions clear and maintainable, which is something that becomes quite awkward using only plain nanorc files.
Note: if ~/.nanorctheme exists, it will be used as a custom theme, in
place of default.nanorctheme. A custom theme may also be specified by copying
the theme-definition file in themes/ directory first, and then installing
with make THEME=your-custom-theme (note that you do not need to specify
the path to a file, neither do you need to specify file's extension). To find
out how themes are defined, have a look at the default theme (file
default.nanorctheme). You must define all token types found in that file
in order for syntax highlighting to work correctly with your custom theme. Bear
in mind that the format of the theme-definition file has changed compared
to the format used in source repositories (it used to be a sed script, while
now such script is automatically generated from the chosen theme-definition
file during the build process).
Note 2: don't forget that if you execute make via sudo (e.g. to install
global syntax highlighting rules as outlined above), then ~/.nanorctheme will
refer to a file in root's home directory, not your own.
There appears to be a bug in older versions of nano that causes
highlighting to fail when /etc/nanorc and ~/.nanorc both contain
syntax rules. The usual workaround is to remove all syntax and include
commands from one file or the other, or to use a newer version of nano.
In order to reliably highlight keywords, this projects makes heavy use of
the GNU regex word boundary extensions (\< and \>). BSD implementations
also have these extensions but use a different, incompatible syntax
([[:<:]] and [[:>:]]). Since version 2.1.5, nano can automatically
translate the GNU syntax to BSD syntax at run-time, but for the benefit of
people running a pre-2.1.5 version of nano on OS X or *BSD, the .nanorc
file itself can be translated by installing with make BSDREGEX=1.
Because nano compiles against the platform's native regex library and some
platforms don't support \s (as it's not required by POSIX ERE).
To the extent possible under law, the author(s) have dedicated all copyright and related and neighboring rights to this software to the public domain worldwide. This software is distributed without any warranty.
You should have received a copy of the CC0 Public Domain Dedication along with this software. If not, you can download it from their website.