Author Topic: Syntax color coding questions  (Read 7893 times)

abushnell

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Syntax color coding questions
« on: September 30, 2008, 06:20:37 PM »
I have what I hope are relative simple questions to answer regarding setting up the Color coding inside of SlickEdit. I am trying to get my color highlighting up to the lines of what I see in Visual Studio and I am noticing the following that I cannot seem to get to work in SlickEdit:

#1: Some system/core types are not getting highlited. For example, in my C# file the following statements look like:

using System;

However, in Visual Studio it is:

using System;

How do I get the System (or for that matter other namespace names etc.) to be colored like keywords or user defined.

#2: I set the background color of my editor windows to be Silver, however that also impacts the Build, output and search result tabs which I would like to keep white? Anyway to do that?

Thanks,

Andrew

chrisant

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Re: Syntax color coding questions
« Reply #1 on: September 30, 2008, 07:34:39 PM »
Slick's color coding is not integrated with Slick's tagging support.

I'm not sure why not; my guess would be that either color coding hasn't received much attention lately, or that there is some kind of performance issue that is too costly to address at the moment.

Slick's color coding could use a major update to:
  • Integrate with tagging support.  E.g. be able to do color coding based on tag type.
  • Have multiple user-defined keyword groups, instead of only one.  Three would be nice.
  • Allow custom regexs for highlighting.  If users abuse this then naturally it could impact performance.  As long as users understand why performance is impacted that seems fine.  As a precaution, perhaps the implementation could measure how much time is spent on the regex color coding, and somehow warn the user if "too much" time is spent on that.

abushnell

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Re: Syntax color coding questions
« Reply #2 on: September 30, 2008, 07:40:38 PM »
OK, I see. I also see there is a way to define keywords etc. to add to the color coding. In this dialog there is an Import... what does that import from? The doc does not seem to help.

chrisant

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Re: Syntax color coding questions
« Reply #3 on: September 30, 2008, 09:02:14 PM »
The Help says that the Import... button is for importing lexer definitions from a VLX file.  The Import... button is outside of the tabs, so it definitely is not related to importing user defined keywords, if that's what you were wondering.

For more information about VLX files, do a Search for "vlx" in the SlickEdit Help.  The last matching topic listed is (for me) "VLX File and Color Coding", which I think will give the information you're looking for about VLX files.

For more information about building a custom lexer, check other posts in the forums.  That's basically for building support for a custom language that isn't natively supported by SlickEdit, though.
« Last Edit: September 30, 2008, 09:04:02 PM by chrisant »