Nano is Free Software and a nice intro text editor. It also starts up very quickly and has good syntax highlighting functionality, so it makes a nice file viewer. The syntax highlighting is configured in the ~/.nanorc file. See the attached code and screenshot. I was looking for good nano syntax highlighting code for R when I found by Stephen Haptonstahl's code here: http://srh.ucdavis.edu/drupal/node/20 He is happy for others to use the code, modify it and distribute it. My edited version of his code is attached. To use it, just append it to your ~/.nanorc file. There's also a systemwide way to use it, but I don't know offhand. To use nano in a view-only mode, just use the -v option to turn off editing functionality: nano -v file.R The .R file extension will cause Nano to use the R syntax highlighting, but it can also be triggered with the -Y option: nano -v -Y R file.whatever Of course, nano also is an editor, so just drop the -v option if you want to edit a file. The screenshot looks pretty nice now (I'm using xterm with white on black and haven't tested with black on white), but I'm sure it can be improved further. I don't have time to work on it much now, but maybe someone else will want to pick it up. Best, Mike -- Michael B. Miller, Ph.D. Bioinformatics Specialist Minnesota Center for Twin and Family Research Department of Psychology University of Minnesota -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: R_nanorc.txt URL: <https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/attachments/20100313/f9e51f27/attachment.txt> -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: nano_R.png Type: image/png Size: 35111 bytes Desc: URL: <https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/attachments/20100313/f9e51f27/attachment.png>