[Help-nano] Understanding syntax highlighting in nano

[nano]

Greetings,

I used pine and pico way back in the day, and after a 'brief' hiatus I'm back in the groove and looking to customise my coding environment.  nano seems to offer everything I need in a cheerful editor, so I'm looking to wrap my head around the syntax highlighting and settle in for the long haul.

I have two questions I hope someone can help with:

1)  I suspect that the eight basic colours that can be selected — white, black, red, blue, green, yellow, magenta, and cyan — map directly (and numerically) to the terminal palette (which, in my case, is GNOME Terminal 3.18.3 on Ubuntu 16.04.3).  If that's the case, then the only way I can manipulate the palette is to do so at the terminal level — correct?

2)  I'm familiar with Perl regular expressions, but the regexes used in syntax files seem to be a tad different.  I gather from the docs that they are 'extended regular expressions'.  Am I to understand from this that we have full support of everything in Chapter 3 of the GNU Grep 3 Manual (http://www.gnu.org/software/grep/manual/grep.html#Regular-Expressions)?

Cheers!

Tim