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I was wondering how could I make lines commented with a # highlighted in a different colour in nano?

I saw this question on askubuntu that shows how to syntax highlight for different languages. However this is overkill for just highlighting comments.

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Syntax highlighting tends to be language specific. However, if you want to do it for all files, you can simply create a very very simple language definition. I took the Perl syntax style (which treats lines starting with # as comments) from /usr/share/nano/perl.nanorc and adapted it to:

syntax "All" "."
color green "^\s*#.*"

As far as I can tell, the nano syntax highlight format needs at least one test to define the file type, and then you can set filters for the color. So, I used the most simple test I can think of, that the file's name contains at least one character, and I named this syntax style All:

syntax "All" "."

I then told it to color lines starting with 0 or more spaces and then a # in green:

color green "^\s*#.*"

So, if you create a file called $HOME/.nanorc and paste those two lines into it, your comments will be highlighted in green.

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  • When using .nanorc with includes to multiple language files, include this "All" first. That will make more specific configuration take precedence.
    – Tamir Daniely
    Apr 10, 2018 at 10:49

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