Re: [Help-nano] Understanding syntax highlighting in nano

[Benno Schulenberg]

Hello Tim,

Op 30-12-17 om 12:58 schreef address@hidden:
> 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?

Correct.  There are two patches that add support for 256 colors, though:

  https://savannah.gnu.org/patch/?8553
  https://savannah.gnu.org/patch/?6873

So... if you find nano lacking in color, you could brush one of those up
and start lobbying for its inclusion.  :)

> 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)?

Right.  Although I don't see mention of \` and \' there, so the following
may be a more complete summary:


https://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/egrep-regular-expression-syntax.html

Benno