Hello Bernward,
I checked the regexes and could not find any clou, that the regex for awk could catch shell scripts:
Okay.
If a wrong regex would be the cause of the problem, the effect should be a wrong syntax highlighting, but not just _no_ highlighting.
Correct. To figure out what is going wrong, please move your /etc/nanorc and your .nanorc to a safe place, and then force a reinstall of nano. This should put a correct /etc/nanorc back into your filesystem. Check whether shell scripts are colored correctly now. If yes, then again make your one-line .nanorc, that does an include of your self-made awk.nanorc. Then check again if shell scripts get colored okay. If not, then please show me the exact contents of your .nanorc, your awk.nanorc, and your /etc/nanorc. (I have just run 2.2.6, and when I use your one-line .nanorc, shell scripts still get colored fine, so... it's not a fault in 2.2.6 proper. But... now I see that your nano has a strange version number: 2.2.6-1+b1. That version I cannot find anywhere in Debian. The only 2.2.6 version is in oldstable, and that is 2.2.6-3 (https://packages.debian.org/source/oldstable/nano). So... Did you compile nano yourself? Or are you on something else than plain Debian?)
In the meantime, I found two things which seem noteworthy, one information and one rumour: 1) on the nano home page, the recommendation for the current version 2.8 to build a user specific .nanorc still suggests to copy the sample.nanorc to start with, which is the same as copying /etc/nanorc
It is only the same as copying /etc/nanorc, because distros copy the sample rcfile to /etc/nanorc. Which is good -- it should be the recommended practice.
[https://www.nano-editor.org/dist/v2.8/faq.html#3.9a]. This means, that puting only selected commands in .nanorc ist _not_ recommended.
No, one shouldn't read it like that. That FAQ item was written long ago; I will change it to say one should read 'man nanorc' and then edit ~/.nanorc and put there just the few settings that one wants. I suppose that the recommendation to copy the sample.nanorc file to ~/.nanorc was made just so that you don't need to have two terminals open side-by-side but have all the data right there in one file and you can just throw away what you don't need and uncomment the things that you want. But I never did it that way. I always just put the settings that I needed into ~/.nanorc, like set boldtext, set nowrap, set smooth, and set quickblank.
2) On https://github.com/nanorc/nanorc I found an anonymous rumour: „There appears to be a bug in older versions of nano that causes highlighting to fail when /etc/nanorc and ~/.nanorc both contain syntax rules. The usual workaround is to remove all syntax and include commands from one file or the other, or to use a newer version of nano.“ But I could not find a reference for this statement nor a version, for which it should be valid.
I suspect that that rumour was caused by your bug report three years ago. :) Let's find out where things go wrong by first making your situation as standard as possible, as described above, and then making small modifications. Regards, Benno
