[Nano-devel] Bracket flashing

[Andrew Ho]

Hello,

First off, thanks to Chris and everybody else who has worked on nano.
It's a fine lightweight editor that I use every day and recommend
regularly to people new to Unix editors.

The top feature missing from GNU nano that I want is bracket flashing...
that is, live parenthesis, square bracket, and curly brace matching
whenever a user types the closing delimiter. Some years back when doing
some Scheme programming, I implemented this as a patch for pico. I find
this functionality invaluable during programming.

I've attached my proposal for the behavior (bflash.txt) and a diff against
nano 1.2.3 (bflash.diff) which implements a first cut at implementing the
behavior. This was after my first glance at nano source code, so it is a
bit messy, and has some significant bugs (for example, if the current line
has wrapped left, the wrong thing happens). However, it's stable enough
that it's already enhancing my day-to-day nano use.

Would this be a desirable capability to add to the nano unstable branch?
It could be offered as a compile time option if people feel this is too
drastic of a pico departure. If it seems useful to others, I'd be glad to
clean up the patches a bit and submit them... I'd probably be asking for a
few pointers as to how things are done within nano, too.

Humbly,

Andrew

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew Ho               http://www.tellme.com/       address@hidden
Engineer                    1-800-555-TELL          Voice 650-930-9062
Tellme Networks, Inc.                                 Fax 650-930-9101
----------------------------------------------------------------------

bflash.txt
Description: Text document

bflash.diff
Description: Text document