Patch GNU Nano to Add Bracket Flashing

You are here: Andrew Ho > Software > Nano Bracket Flashing

Powerful programmers' text editors like Emacs or Vim generally include a feature where when you type a close bracket (like a close parenthesis), the corresonding open bracket is briefly highlighted. This is indispensible when writing code, which often involves lots of balanced delimiters.

I've written a patch to add this feature to the GNU Nano editor. The patch should work against GNU Nano 1.2.5, and I've tested it on Solaris, Linux, and FreeBSD.

Download

• nano_bracketflash.patch (10k), a diff you can apply using GNU Patch
• nano-1.2.5p.tar.gz (897k), the complete patched source tree

The patch file is also useful to read if you just want to understand how the patch works, the code is slightly kludgy, but well documented.

Andrew Ho (andrew@zeuscat.com)