Nano syntax color highlighting in windows

Question

How do I get this to work, I did add the color syntax highlighting configuration in nano.rc and .nanorc, but nothing happen.

Answer 1

The previous answer is outdated and also wrong.

Most of the problem with the coloring is due to the fact that the native build windows version doesn't support windows paths, as it's using GNU's glob(). So you need to use forward POSIX style paths in your syntax include statement in the .nanorc file.

Here is the entire install procedure:

1. Download the latest Nano build from here OR here.

2. Download the latest syntax highlighter files *.nanorc from here

3. Chose an installation location. For example in C:\nano\.

4. Extract the contents into that directory and move it around so that you have:

C:\nano\bin\       # For the nano.exe
C:\nano\nanorc\    # For all the *.nanorc files
C:\nano\doc\       # For the documentation files

5. Put the .nanorc into your home directory in: C:\Users\<username>\.nanorc.

6. Add the nano file paths to your System Path:

# To set and update the Windows (System) "Path" in Powershell, use:
[System.Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("PATH", $Env:Path + ";C:\nano\bin", "Machine")

7. Reboot, restart explorer, or install refreshenv from choco.

8. Optional: Run nano once, to ensure that a filepos_history file is created.

9. You probably want to be able to run Nano with both normal or Administrator privileges, but not having to keep track of more edit locations and 2nd config files. To do this, you need to symlink your own versions of the nano config and history setting files, to the admin versions.

# Link last cursor position files:
New-Item -ItemType SymbolicLink -Path "C:\ProgramData\.local\share\nano\filepos_history" -Target  "C:\Users\<username>\.local\share\nano\filepos_history" -Force

# Link .nanorc files:
New-Item -ItemType SymbolicLink -Path "C:\ProgramData\.nanorc" -Target  "C:\Users\<username>\.nanorc" -Force

8. IMPORTANT!
   Edit your .nanorc to include the correct POSIX paths to all your *.nanorc files.

# Why not use nano to edit your .nanorc
cd ~
nano .nanorc

# Add the following line(s):
#include "C:\nano\nanorc\*.nanorc"     # Windows paths does NOT work!
include "/nano/nanorc/*.nanorc"        # This works!

Enjoy!

Answer 2

Set an environment variable named HOME to your user directory (the one that cd ~ places you in eg. C:\users\yourname).

Then copy the nano.rc file from the installation directory to your home directory.

NOTE: it's nano.rc not .nanorc like it is in Linux -- the latter will not work in the Windows version.

Then uncomment the settings you want in the nano.rc file. The current Windows port does not have mouse support so do not enable that feature.

Make sure to save the nano.rc with unix line endings or it will not work.

Go grab syntax highlighting from somewhere. Example: https://github.com/scopatz/nanorc

To install from the repo above, open the folder where you extracted the nano application files to and type this:

mkdir syntax
cd syntax
git clone https://github.com/scopatz/nanorc.git .

You may want to adjust the nanorc.nanorc file from the repo above to include .rc if you want syntax highlighting on the main nano.rc file. To do this, adjust the line:

syntax "Nanorc" "\.?nanorc$"

To this:

syntax "Nanorc" "\.(nano)rc$"

Obviously do not use the installation shell script or the .nanorc from the repo above since they are specific to Linux.

Make sure you point to the syntax files using traditional Windows file paths not the *nix ones (provided by default).

Finally, add the directory where you unzipped nano.exe and accompanying files to in your PATH environment variable so you can just type nano in PowerShell or cmd.exe