• It’s very simple (as campared to Vim, which I was not able to quickly grasp on)
• It’s available by default on almost any *nix distro out there
• It has syntax highlighting (always turned off by default for some reason)

It this post I’ll show you how to install latest Nano to your Mac OS X environment with syntax highlighting turned on for most of programming&markup languages.

For managing my OSX packages I’m using brew, but unfortunately it does not have nano formula yet. Built-in version of nano is pretty outdated (2.0.6), and there is no binaries available exclusively for mac. So we’re going to do  a classic configure-make-install dance.

Step1. Download nano sources

wget http://www.nano-editor.org/dist/v2.2/nano-2.2.6.tar.gz


Step2. Download syntax highlighting configs for nano

wget http://webapp.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/nanorc.tar

These are compiled from different sources over the internet with some small mods made by myself.

Step3. Compile & install

tar -xvvf nano-2.2.6.tar.gz
cd nano-2.2.6
sudo ./configure --prefix=/usr/
sudo make install
cd /
sudo tar -xvvf nanorc.tar

At this point you’re done. Latest nano with syntax highlighting will be installed at your system paths.