Ticket #3734 (new task)
Improve the syntax documentation
| Reported by: | mooffie | Owned by: | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Priority: | major | Milestone: | Future Releases |
| Component: | documentation | Version: | master |
| Keywords: | Cc: | ||
| Blocked By: | Blocking: | ||
| Branch state: | no branch | Votes for changeset: |
Description
There are several features not documented well, or not documented at all:
[I'll edit this text from time to time to improve and extend it. Everybody: feel free to add comments and I'll incorporate them here. When we're finished we'll convert this to nroff format.]
Star
Matches any length of characters (except newline). To be exact, it matches any character which is not the next one in the pattern. This effectively makes it "non-greedy" and lets you do ${*} to match a shell variable.
Plus
Surprisingly, it does not mean "match 1 or more characters". TODO.
Braces
\{chars\} matches one character.
Brackets
\[chars\] matches 0 or more characters. It's greedy, which means that if chars contains any of the characters appearing later in the pattern then the match will fail. (TODO: what's the purpose of "if (p[1] == d) i--;" introduced in commit df20f28f2e2b614 ?)
Misc
- Pressing C-s twice effectively reloads the syntax file (so you don't have to exit the editor, or MC itself, to test your syntax modifications).
