id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	priority	milestone	component	version	resolution	keywords	cc	blockedby	blocking	branch_state	votes
3734	Improve the syntax documentation	mooffie		"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)."	task	new	major	Future Releases	documentation	master						no branch