Nano syntax highlighting in Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion)?

c macos terminal syntax-highlighting nano
sukhvir picture sukhvir · Mar 10, 2012 · Viewed 25.4k times · Source

How to enable syntax highlighting for nano in Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion)?

According to what I found so far on Google is that it has got to do with /.nanorc file. I have no idea how to get it or make it?

When I try to find nano in my terminal this is what I get:

Notra:~ Sukhvir$ whereis nano
/usr/bin/nano

According to what I found on Internet this is the file I need to edit:

~/.nanorc

But how do I get to it/how to open it/if I don't have it then how to make it?

I am a bit new to programming folks, so step-by-step instructions will be highly appreciated.

I need it for C mainly.

According to what I found online, I have to paste this into the .nanorc file:

include "/usr/share/nano/nanorc.nanorc"
include "/usr/share/nano/c.nanorc"

However this will not work because there is no such directory as /usr/share/nano.

I also just did ls /usr/share/ and according to the results there is no nano in that directory. Is this a Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) issue or an issue on my Mac?

Answer

Joel Purra picture Joel Purra · Dec 19, 2012

On Mac, Homebrew (brew) will allow you to easily upgrade nano to a newer version than the one that came with Mac OSX.

Install brew, then install a new version of nano from the Terminal.

brew install nano

Installing this way includes the /usr/local/share/nano folder containing the default syntax highlight files. You can now include "/usr/local/share/nano/c.nanorc" in ~/.nanorc.

Bonus: a run-once one-liner to add all languages.

/bin/ls /usr/local/share/nano/*.nanorc | xargs -I {} echo 'include "{}"' >> ~/.nanorc

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