Re: [Nano-devel] Bracket flashing

[David L. Ramsey]

--- Andrew Ho <address@hidden> wrote:
>Hello,
>
>First off, thanks to Chris and everybody else who has worked on nano.

You're welcome.

>It's a fine lightweight editor that I use every day and recommend
>regularly to people new to Unix editors.

Oh good.

>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.

It certainly sounds useful.

>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.

I haven't had time to look at it yet, but I'll do that soon.

>Would this be a desirable capability to add to the nano unstable
>branch?

I believe so.

>It could be offered as a compile time option if people feel this is too
>drastic of a pico departure.

Since Pico doesn't have bracket searching, nano's already departed from
it in that area.  Besides, since it's a relatively minor feature, making
it a compile-time option seems like overkill to me.

>If it seems useful to others, I'd be glad to clean up the patches a bit
>and submit them...

Go right ahead.

>I'd probably be asking for a few pointers as to how things are done
>within nano, too.

No problem.

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