Cygwin regex.h implementation doesn't support some special sequences, for example \< (beginning of word), \> (end of word) and \b (word boundary). This causes a usability bug with the nano editor, which uses these sequences extensively in most of its syntax highlighting rules. For example, in /usr/share/nano/c.nanorc, one of the rules goes like this: color brightyellow "\<(for|if|while|do|else|case|default|switch)\>" \< and \> are used so that other words, e.g. 'fifo', 'elsewhere', 'undo' don't match, as they aren't keywords.
Test case 1: Open nano and write a test message, for example "if a fifo is full". Do a regexp search (using ^W M-R) for "\<if\>". No matches will be found, because \< and \> don't have their special meaning and simply match the characters < and >. Test case 2: To include C syntax rules, do: echo 'include "/usr/share/nano/c.nanorc"' >> ~/.nanorc Open a C source file in nano. Enable syntax highlighting with M-Y. Strings and preprocessor instructions are highlighted (because those rules don't contain \< \>), but keywords (e.g. if, for, return) aren't. I tested both nano 2.0.6 (currently in cygwin) and 2.0.7 (latest stable version, compiled manually from source). The problem wasn't present in Linux glibc nano 2.0.7. When I found out that Cygwin uses newlib instead of glibc, it led me to believe that insufficient regex support in newlib might be the cause. I attached the output of cygcheck -s -r -v, but I doubt this is a problem with my system configuration. Thank you for your time reading this. Tomi Belan
cygcheck.out
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