Re: patch for new feature: placeholders in execute command

Benno Schulenberg <[email protected]> Tue, 18 Nov 2025 11:14:48 +0100

Newsgroups	gmane.editors.nano.devel
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Op 17-11-2025 om 16:32 schreef Luca Coraggio:
> What I meant is not to insert the documentation in the current document,
> but to show the doc in an external terminal, that is opened "on the fly".
> I typically spawn a new terminal and type the command that brings the
> documentation; I think it is just more convenient to highlight a word
> in nano, and have a keypress do that for me.

Oh.  Unfortunately nano has just one cutbuffer, so passing two parameters
(the filename and the highlighted word) to the external script will need
some creative gluing.  For example (all on one line):

   bind Sh-M-M "{copy}{writeout}==={paste}{copy}{cancel}{execute}
        yourscript.sh {paste}{enter}" main

Then yourscript.sh will have to separate the filename (before the ===)
from the highlighted word (after the ===), deduce the filetype from the
filename, and then invoke the appropriate doc reader with the extracted
word as a parameter...  Quite some scripting.  :|  How many different
documentation readers (besides `pydoc` and `man`) do you use that this
is worth the effort?

Instead of first manually highlighting a word, you could also make the
keystroke highlight the current word before doing the rest:

   bind Sh-M-K "{nextword}{mark}{prevword}{copy}..." ...

Then it will work more like Shift+K in vim.


Benno

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