Enabling Syntax Highlighting in Nano

I'm developing a piece of software in PHP and testing some changes directly on the server. To edit the PHP files I use nano (I never got used to vi). So I missed having colors in the code to make it easier to read and to break up the monochrome monotony a bit. And it works over SSH!

Check whether the highlight files are in the /usr/share/nano/ directory:

$ ls /usr/share/nano/
asm.nanorc     fortran.nanorc   man.nanorc     ocaml.nanorc   ruby.nanorc
awk.nanorc     gentoo.nanorc    mgp.nanorc     patch.nanorc   sh.nanorc
c.nanorc       groff.nanorc     mutt.nanorc    perl.nanorc    tcl.nanorc
cmake.nanorc   html.nanorc      nano-menu.xpm  php.nanorc     tex.nanorc
css.nanorc     java.nanorc      nanorc.nanorc  pov.nanorc     xml.nanorc
debian.nanorc  makefile.nanorc  objc.nanorc    python.nanorc

In my case all the files were there except php.nanorc. Exactly the one I needed. So I grabbed it from the net. Here it is in full:

## PHP Syntax Highlighting
syntax "php" "\.php[2345s~]?$"
color white start="<\?(php|=)?" end="\?>"
# Functions
color brightblue "([a-zA-Z0-9_-]*)\("
# Constructs
color brightblue "(class|extends|goto) ([a-zA-Z0-9_]*)"
color green "[^a-z0-9_-]{1}(var|class|function|echo|case|break|default|exit|switch|if|else|elseif|endif|foreach|endforeach|@|while|public|private|protected|return|true|false|null|TRUE|FALSE|NULL|const|static|extends|as|array|require|include|require_once|include_once|define|do|continue|declare|goto|print|in)[^a-z0-9_-]{1}"
color brightblue "[a-zA-Z0-9]+:"
# Variables
color white "\$[a-zA-Z_0-9$]*|[=!<>]"
color white "\->[a-zA-Z_0-9$]*|[=!<>]"
# Special Characters
color yellow "[.,{}();]"
color yellow "\["
color yellow "\]"
color yellow "[=][^>]"
# Numbers
color magenta "[+-]*([0-9]\.)*[0-9]+([eE][+-]?([0-9]\.)*[0-9])*"
color magenta "0x[0-9a-zA-Z]*"
# Special Variables
color brightblue "(\$this|parent::|self::|\$this-\>)"
# Bitwise Operations
color magenta "(\;|\||\^){1}"
# And/Or/SRO/etc
color green "(\;\;|\|\||::|=>|->)"
# Online Comments
color brightyellow "(#.*|//.*)$"
# STRINGS!
color red "('[^']*?')|(\"[^\"]*?\")"
# Inline Variables
color white "\{\$[^}]*\}"
# PHP Tags
color red "(<\?(php)?|\?>)"
# General HTML
color red start="\?>" end="<\?(php|=)?"
# trailing whitespace
color ,green "[^[:space:]]{1}[[:space:]]+$"
# multi-line comments
color brightyellow start="/\*" end="\*/"

I saved the php.nanorc file in a folder under my own user. Then I needed to create a .nanorc file and include the path to the syntax files:

$ nano ~/.nanorc
include /usr/share/nano/sh.nanorc
inclue ~/php.nanorc

And that's it, just edit a PHP file:

Nano with Syntax Highlighting