VSCode is built on top of MonacoEditor which doesn't support Textmate grammars and themes. But somehow VSCode made it possible. I am curious how VSCode is able to do this.
I am asking because I am making a code editor (based on Monaco) with TextMate grammar and theme support. But I am unable to understand how I can achieve it.
Though there are packages like monaco-textmate to make TextMate grammars work with Monaco, syntax highlighting is still not working properly.
TextMate grammars depend on a particular regex implementation / library called Oniguruma, which is implemented in C. Monaco however is designed to run in the browser, and the JavaScript regex engine available there is not compatible with Oniguruma. All of this is explained in detail in the "Why doesn't the editor support TextMate grammars?" section of Monaco's FAQ. It also mentions the possibiliy of perhaps eventually compiling Oniguruma to WebAssembly to work around this.
VSCode itself uses vscode-textmate for its TMLanguage handling, which has the Oniguruma library as a native dependency. VSCode can have native dependencies because it doesn't run in a browser environment.
According to monaco-textmate's readme, it is actually heavily based on vscode-textmate:
99% of the code in this repository is extracted straight from vscode-textmate
And it does use the WASM approach mentioned earlier:
monaco-textmate relies on onigasm package to provide oniguruma regex engine in browsers. onigasm itself relies on WebAssembly.
As to why syntax highlighting doesn't always work as expected with monaco-textmate... I have no idea, I expect this is simply a bug in the implementation. Perhaps wait for a response from the maintainer, the issue you linked is fairly new.
At least conceptually there shouldn't be a reason why it couldn't achieve the same syntax highlighting VSCode does, since it uses the same regex flavour.
Related
Is there a way in VS Code to format code according to the style that a person prefers? I guess there might be a plugin for this sort of thing but I've not found that.
For example, I prefer 'K&R' coding style while a colleague prefers 'Whitesmiths' style. When we share code or functions it would be nice to autoformat code into the style that each prefers.
This does not seem like it should be so difficult for a plugin to do except that coding style also has to parse the language of the code, so Whitesmiths PowerShell is going to be different from Whitesmiths on Perl I would imagine.
Are there any plugins like this (or internal functionality in VS Code - it's a very comprehensive tool without installing any plugins of course!) that people use regularly like this?
In contrast to its name, "JIndent" (commercial) is a tool I've been using for the exact purpose you're asking about.
Is there a way to get any kind of syntax highlighting for .cjsx (jsx in coffeescript) files in WebStorm?
Currently, I'm using a Sublime plugin, which is great, but I'd prefer to stay in WebStorm if possible.
I understand WebStorm supports TextMate bundles, so that may be a viable option but I couldn't find one for cjsx.
Atom, the hackable editor, written in coffeescript, has great support for cjsx. (yes, look at that, another really, really, really large project using coffeescript)
I'm using the community (a really, really large community) supported package cjsx-language https://atom.io/packages/language-cjsx
I've almost broken the $1200 chain of IntelliJ. Here is a gist of my atom setup and packages: https://gist.github.com/littlebee/34a60734de79f6f78c56
This was saved by this genius little package: https://atom.io/packages/sync-settings. It wont let you backup to my gist without a key but it might let you restore from it.
Use this textmate bundle (meant for webstorm cjsx): https://github.com/ruswerner/cjsx.tmbundle
I would advice against using CoffeeScript in WebStorm for large projects (see comments section). If you really need to, then you can always use backticks to tell the CoffeeScript compiler to skip the code within the backticks.
render: () ->
return `<div>Hi</div>`;
WebStorm will highlight this just fine if in Settings you select "JSX Harmony" as in the Javascript settings. Now let these cjsx files compile in 2 steps: CoffeeScript -> JavaScript with JSX, then JavaScript with JSX -> JavaScript. If you're using Webpack, it's as simple as:
{include: /\.cjsx$/, loaders: ["coffee-loader", "jsx-loader"]}
I know TextWrangler shows the option, but it doesn't actually do anything. So what I want is autocomplete, either with a key combination, or while I type.
Syntax coloring/highlighting is a requirement as well, though I know Xcode and TextWrangler have that.
You might want to use Lua Development Tools for this purpose. It has syntax coloring, plus it is doing smart autocomplete, depending on what your actual context is (required modules, ...)
It is an Eclipse Technology project, and it is Open Source! (EPL license).
Project web page - http://www.eclipse.org/koneki/ldt
Installation via Eclipse Marketplace - http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/lua-development-tools-koneki
I don't know if you have seen this page, but it seems a good place to start:
http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaEditorSupport
If I search for "completion" I get:
Decoda (Win)
LuaEdit (Win)
DForD (Win)
NsEditor (Win)
Visual Studio + LuaLite
Eclipse + LuaEclipse or LunarEclipse (java)
I personally use Vim + SuperTab (which only auto-fills with things that you have previously written).
There's a nice plugin for IntelliJ IDEA for Lua. IntelliJ IDEA is really nice, though kind of biggish.
Aside of that there is also TextAdept which is a lot smaller, and 100% configurable in Lua.
And probably a bunch of others.
If you want full (semantic) autocompletion, you should try lua-inspect (source code), which can be installed in the SciTE editor, and also into ViM using vim-lua-inspect.
It uses Metalua to fully parse the source code into AST and then performs code analysis. Apart from simple keyword-based syntax highlighters, it can:
differentiate between local/global variables, parameters and unused variables
jump to the definition of a variable/function
autocomplete table members
correctly rename variables/functions (not only definitions but also uses)
Even though it is not yet stable, and tends to hang on large scripts, it is very usable for standard Lua programs, mainly for it's intelligent autocompletion and renaming.
I am thinking of modifying an existing IDE (Ex : By developing a plugin) to provide support for a proprietary scripting language. I just need to implement few features like syntax highlighting, Autocompleting etc. (i.e the requirements are really simple). What would be the best IDE or Text editor to integrate the feature. As an example if I think to develop an eclipse plugin for that it would be a pain.
What do you think about Notepad ++?
You might want to give the NetBeans Generic Language Framework a try.
NetBeans project called Generic Languages Framework allows you to define a programming language and integrate it to NetBeans IDE. In the first step you should describe the language - lexical part (define tokens using regular expressions) and syntax (grammar rules). In the second step you can define how to visualize this language in NetBeans. You can define colors for tokens (syntax coloring) or folding (based on grammar rules). You can define what parts of this language should be displayed in the navigator, and how to indent this language plus many other features.
This tutorial should guide you through the process of creating new NetBeans module, adding languages support into it, describing lexical and syntax structure of your language and adding support for all standard editor # features for your language.
Notepad++ allows you to define custom syntax highlight files in a very easy way, but it's not a very good solution for auto-completion (look at this SO question).
If you want a real IDE to extend, I suggest you to use Eclipse.
Update: Tutorial on how to develop an Eclipse plugin.
In vim you can easily add your custom syntax highlighting rules by adding another file in the syntax folder; for the details it is best to look at the help.
If I remember correctly notepad++ also allows defining custom syntax files.
I really enjoyed defining syntax highlighting rules in Notepad++ for the various build logs and artifacts I've worked on in the past to make certain text markers pop out. I was wondering if VSCode has any capabilities to do likewise.
For reference to the unfamiliar here's the Notepad++ documentation and a live demonstration:
https://npp-user-manual.org/docs/user-defined-language-system/
How to Create Custom Language Definitions in Notepad++
Looks like there is support for something in this direction. The terminology is slightly different though and there may not be a GUI interface like Notedpad++
Declarative Language Feature
Syntax Highlight Guide: VS Code uses TextMate grammar for syntax highlighting. This guide will walk you through writing a simple TextMate grammar and converting it into a VS Code extension.
Create Custom Language in Visual Studio Code
https://code.visualstudio.com/api/language-extensions/overview#declarative-language-features
https://code.visualstudio.com/api/language-extensions/language-configuration-guide