I enabled syntax highlight in nano (PHP), but not happy with the default, I would like for example to have the comments displayed in very light grey.However, the documentation I found seems to suggest I can only write colors like yellow, red etc.Is there a way to specify a color by its hex/RGB code?Is there a limitation in the number of colors bash/nano and so on can display? Obviously I am not very experienced with the Linux world.Same question for VIM, I might switch to VIM if that is not possible.
Can I/how to specify colors in hex or RGB in nano syntax highlight config?
vim;colors;nano
nano is small.  In this case, it limits the choices to the 8 predefined ANSI colors (plus bright/bold) so that it can use the predefined symbols from curses.h (such as COLOR_BLUE) as a guide to naming.Many terminals support 256 predefined colors; nano can't take advantage of them, but Vim can.Terminals which allow directly specifying the R/G/B content of a color are an exception rather than a rule—unlike GUIs.Some terminals (including Xterm, which I maintain) support the escape sequence \e]4;N;#RRGGBB\a to change palette color N to the specified RGB value, and \e[38;2;R;G;Bm to set the foreground color to the closest approximation in the palette of the specified RGB value (use 48 instead of 38 for the background color).  However, changing a palette color is not useful for nano, because it is taking advantage of the existing palette, in contrast with (the much larger) Vim, which can do this with an add-on.