Patch GNU Nano to Add Bracket Flashing

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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. You can download these below either as a diff that you can apply using GNU Patch, or as a complete source distribution.

Download

• For Nano 1.2.5, tested on Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, and OS X:
  • nano-1.2.5_bracketflash.patch (10KB)
  • nano-1.2.5p.tar.gz (897KB)
• For Nano 2.2.6, tested on Linux, FreeBSD, and OS X:
  • nano-2.2.6_bracketflash.patch (10KB)
  • nano-2.2.6p.tar.gz (1.5MB)

The patch files are also useful to read if you just want to understand how the patch works; in each case, the code is slightly kludgy, mainly due to the many globals and complicated horizontal whitespace handling routines used in Nano.

See Also

To gain a couple lines of vertical whitespace:

• Patch GNU Nano to Disable Titlebar

Andrew Ho (andrew@zeuscat.com)