Add to language syntax in Netbeans/Eclipse - eclipse

This may seem like seem like a bit of a weird/uncommon request but I am trying to find out if it is possible. I would like to add to the language syntax in Netbeans or Eclipse easily without needing to create an entirely new language. According to this question How to add more syntax elements for eclipse it is not possible in Eclipse, but that was asked in 2008 so maybe things have changed.
The reason I want to do it is I am developing in node.js and it uses callbacks quite heavily. So it would be nice if I could make the word 'callback' and 'callback()' be highlighted in a different colour so it can be easily seen in amongst the rest of the code.
Thanks for your help!

The css thing is really easy:
go to Options/Miscellaneous/Files, create new file extension less and then select proper MIME type text/x-css. I Believe that it is possible to extend syntax highlighting in NetBeans IDE but you have to write your own plugin to do that.

Related

VS Code formatting plugins

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.

How to setup a new language IDE

At work we are using a proprietary language and to program we are using Notepad++ with a simple code highlight. That is really annoying so, what I want to do is to invest some time to setup a text editor or an existing IDE to support my language.
I've googled a lot and there are so many options and before starting to work I wanna ask to you what is the best choice.
What I want to do is to have, like an IDE, a syntax highlight, a window with the function list tree, with the local function variables inside the same subtree, maybe text autocomplete (if I type "pro" I would like to see the suggestion "procedure" and if I press enter it will write for me something like
procedure "name" {
--code--
}
with the cursor on "name" ready to change it.
etc etc...
Can you suggest me the right path to follow?
Is it to keep using Notepad++? With sourcecookifier? functionlist?
Or I have to change to another text editor?
Or there is some famous IDE like Eclipse, NetBeans etc that allow to easily add my own language?
PS. my language is pretty simple, I don't have complex structures, is Pascal-like. Something like that:
variable int xyz
PROCEDURE asd
BEGIN
END PROCEDURE asd
I would recommend you to stay with Notepad++ and extend it with some plugins and configuration. This would be fairly quick and easy to set up and still give a big win, even though you might not be able to get all the nice features of something like Eclipse. But since you already know the Notepad++ it wouldn't require learning an entirely new tool.
Some plugins that I have found useful
Function List
Light Explorer
XBrackets Lite
There are probably a lot more that can be useful to you.
Notepad++ also got some built in auto-completion functionality that can be enabled in the settings.
Have you evaluated Eclipse XTEXT ?
What is Xtext?
Xtext is a framework for development of programming languages and domain specific languages.
The only IDE I have used for the last few years is Eclipse. There are lots of other IDEs available, also notable and popular is Netbeans. There are many others. It's important to note that all IDEs have their fans, but I can only speak to Eclipse.
Eclipse is a platform, which means it is an application on which you can build other applications. Eclipse provides a framework which you can customize and extend to produce a working application. It takes care of the user interface, preferences storage, modularisation using OSGi, and lots of other things.
Eclipse has facilities to support what you're looking for:
Syntax highlighting in the editor.
The Outline View provides function and variable listing in a tree
Autocompletion and Suggestions (activated by hitting ctrl-space)
Code Templates to fill out files and procedures etc.
The disadvantage is that customising and extending Eclipse to do what you want isn't trivial. Having written a language debugger for Eclipse, I can tell you that leveraging Eclipse's platform helped enormously, but there's a learning curve. You'd essentially have to be coming up with a new set of plugins to provide your highlighting, outlining, autocomplete suggestions and templates (I'm not sure if template support is built into the platform or not).
So I would say, unless you can find some sort of extensible editor for Eclipse - I know Aptana is extensible for tag-based markup - you are probably as well staying with your existing tooling.
Do explore the other IDEs though - I've heard good things about IDEA as well as Netbeans. :)
Good luck!
I can recommend SynWrite editor. Good support for external languages, fully customizable. (Editor of new lexers is there)

Netbeans - How to extend HTML vocabulary

I've been using netbeans for a couple of years now, mainly on PHP / CakePHP projects.
Recently I've started using Coldfusion, which isn't directly supported. I've found, however, that if I use PHP as a project type, I can load the files and the HTML Renderer does an admirable job with the Coldfusion tags.
I want to make it better and help the renderer to understand some of the tags and, hopefully, thereby improve code indentation and syntax highlighting.
My question, then, is how can I access the HTML dictionary to extend the vocabulary?
NB: This isn't a 'which IDE' question so don't recommend them. I want to know if and how I can achieve this in NetBeans and only Netbeans.
Here are a few ideas. If you render it in HTML, you could probably add a custom name space to the HTML. If setup correctly it can help NetBeans realize that the tags are valid and shouldn't show as an error. It might not give you all the preview and WYSIWYG functionality, but it may be better than what you are getting now. I have only done this on other platforms, but I'm pretty sure NetBeans supports it.
Also I think that NetBeans will let you add CustomTags doing something like this:
http://wiki.netbeans.org/CustomTagActions
Just to note, in terms of ColdFusion the other alternatives are NotePad++ with the CF plugin and IntelliJ now supports CF.
I really like Eclipse - the number of plugins available (SVN, Javascript, CSS, CodCollab, Flashbuilder etc.) is what makes it indispensable IMHO.
I am, however, looking forward to the new version of CFBuilder.
This answer on the same/similar question suggests that there is nothing out there for ColdFusion on netbeans : NetBeans as an editor for ColdFusion scripts?
If you want to build your own ColdFusion plugin for netbeans you need to look at plugin development; http://platform.netbeans.org/tutorials/60/nbm-google.html You could use the Dictionary project from cfeclipse as a basis for your plugin. See this Google Group thread for a bit more information

Is it possible in Eclipse to define syntax highlighting for a language without resorting to Java programming?

I am looking for a way to define some syntax coloring for a language in Eclipse. I only need to highlight certain sets of keywords, so the logic is trivial. So I would like to be able to define these in a plain definition file. Is there perhaps some Eclipse plugin which allows this, or is it possible out of the box?
XText is a more generic and complex solution, which will generate for you the code for a custom Editor able to offer the usual IDE features, that are derived from a grammar (your "plain definition file"), including.
syntax coloring, but also
model navigation (F3, etc.),
code completion,
outline view, and
code templates.
The EclipseColorer plugin may fit the bill!
It's a bit fiddly, but try http://gstaff.org/colorEditor/.
It uses the jEdit syntax highlighting files. So you need to create your highlighting file and add it to the jar in the plugin, as well as editing the catalog file in there to include it.
I used jEdit itself to test and debug my custom highlighting, rather than having to exit Eclipse, make the change and reload it each time.

OpenOffice syntax highlighting

I have some big documentation to do that will contain pieces of code I'd like to give the conventional "coding language" syntax highlighting. I've searched the styles feature to do such a thing, but there is no way to do that (in fact I could only found a forum where people were fighting about adding this feature or not, but this is not the point).
There is an abandoned extension for OpenOffice, but using it freezes my installation of OpenOffice.
What's the easiest way to do this? Should I try to recompile the extension and debug it (although I'm already having a hard time compiling another Java project), or maybe I should use a macro? How to implement this?
One possibility is to use one of the many code to html tools out there and then include the html in your OpenOffice document (using "File..." on the Insert menu).
One possibility is highlight. Vim has a :TOhtml command that will convert the current file to syntax highlighted html using the current colour scheme. I've not tried it, but this looks promising. There are also a few online ones, such as this. I'm sure there are a great many other options.