Inspired by several posts, like Your syntax highlighter is wrong, Coding in color and A case against syntax highlighting and some others, I decided making a Vim theme that applied some of these concepts would be a good idea.
The thing is I'm not exactly sure how.
From what I can tell, in order to make a Vim theme you need to basically link a color with a syntax identifier or name. And repeat this hundreds or dozens of time in order to have in your lap a theme.
Like for example linking the color #ff0000 (red) and the syntax identifier, or key, Error. As an example. Not sure if that's actually the syntax key.
This would work fine, except that, every syntax that I don't consider important I have to define as just a default foreground value.
And let's say I wanted to add a new syntax keyword, I'd have to do it with ftsyntax and stuff (I believe) and that would be filetype specific etc.
So the first question is:
What would be the best way to give everything a default foreground color and only pick the exceptions to have some colors?
And the second, perhaps more important question is:
How do I syntax highlight a specific piece of text without having to add a syntax rule? For example have a regex that finds any = and highlights them green, without having to add a syntax rule specific for that.
Any help is appreciated. Of course if the approach I'm taking to this is not ideal or sucks I am open to suggestions to alternatives. Thank you. :)
See the example syntax file below:
syn keyword myKeywords We Are Important Keywords
syn match myEquals '='
hi link myKeywords Special
hi link myEquals Operator
This will put We, Are, Important and Keywords into the myKeywords syntax group and = into the myEquals syntax group.
Then we specify how we want to highlight them, by linking it to the Special and Operator highlight groups.
See: :help group-name for a list of the highlight groups and what the colors look like with your color-scheme.
In my color-scheme, Special is Red and Operator is green.
By default, everything else is set to the default foreground color.
I saved this to ~/.vim/syntax/greduan.vim and tested with :set syntax=greduan
Your question touches two domains:
syntax definition
syntax highlighting
Syntax definition, as in Caek's answer, is simple for the first 10 minutes but grows very quickly into a major PITA because it is a core aspect of Vim's architecture with ramifications far beyond syntax highlighting.
Syntax highlighting has its pitfalls but it is a lot simpler than syntax definition.
I think that you can tackle the problem described in those blog posts with syntax highlighting first and, if needed, graduate to syntax definition.
Grab a simple colorscheme like Busybee.
Link all the highlight groups you don't need to Normal while leaving the ones you want to keep:
hi link Foo Normal
What would be the best way to give everything a default foreground
color and only pick the exceptions to have some colors?
What is best depends ... for me the best, because quickest way was clearing unwanted highlighting in ~/.vimrc:
sy on
hi c Constant|hi c Error|hi c PreProc|hi c Special|hi c Statement|hi c Type
hi c Identifier
How do I syntax highlight a specific piece of text without having to
add a syntax rule?
If by syntax rule you mean syntax item, I'd say you cannot have syntax highlighting without defining syntax items.
Related
I want to leave my system's Python syntax highlighting mostly intact, but I have a specific pattern I'd like to highlight for an idiom I use a lot. How can I add additional highlighting instructions on top of the existing highlighting done by vim?
(Apologies if this has already been asked. All the vim syntax highlighting questions I found seemed to involve writing a new syntax highlighting from scratch.)
Put your additional :syntax commands into ~/.vim/after/syntax/python.vim, and they will be automatically executed after the original syntax script.
It's easy to highlight stuff that so far isn't parsed at all.
For elements already parsed / hightlighted, you need to find out by which syntax group (e.g. pythonFunction), and add a containedin=pythonFunction clause to your :syntax commands. Without that, the original matching will obscure yours. To find out which syntax group causes the highlighting. :syn list shows all active groups, but it's easier when you install the SyntaxAttr.vim - Show syntax highlighting attributes of character under cursor plugin.
Introducing highlighting across (larger) elements that have multiple existing syntax groups is difficult, as your match will obscure the original ones, and that may break the entire parsing. You need to carefully examine the existing nested element structure, and try to fit in yours, again via contains= and containedin= clauses. Depending on the actual situation, that can be difficult.
For the actual syntax definitions, see the help starting at :h :syn-keyword. Basically, there are simple keyword definitions, regular expression matches, and regions defined by start and end patterns.
I am using MacVim with the Cobalt theme. I found it very nice, however, coming from Sublime Text, I feel there aren't enough different colours which makes my javscript code hard to read.
For example, I'd like the function name to be coloured to make them stand out a bit more:
myClass.prototype.myFunction = function myFunction() {
// here, I'd like "myClass" to have a different color from the text
// same for "prototype" and "myFunction"
}
Another example is the use of methods:
myArray.pop();
// I'd like to change the color of ".pop()" for more visibility
How can I add these types of patterns?
A syntax script parses the programming language into different groups (which can be listed via :syntax list). A colorscheme then prescribes how to color and format each individual group.
So, if there are distinct groups, but your colorscheme just assigns the same color to it, that can be easily changed by putting
:hi link <syntaxGroup> <highlightGroup>
commands into your ~/.vimrc.
The detail of parsing depends on the language and syntax script. Extending an existing syntax (to parse out more details) is possible, but complex. For JavaScript, there exist some alternatives (like this) to the built-in syntax script; you might want to give those a try.
PS: :syn list shows all active groups, but it's easier when you install the SyntaxAttr.vim - Show syntax highlighting attributes of character under cursor plugin.
I use the plugin vim-javascript-syntax.
Spell check in vim is nice enough to not highlight things inside of a math environment when writing LaTeX. This is convenient, but I make some very common typos like "theat" instead of "theta" that would be nice to catch automatically. Is there a way to get the words in the explicit list of 'bad words' to be highlighted regardless of their context?
Note that I still don't want to check whether everything is good within a math environment, just that it is not explicitly bad.
To enable spell checking for a syntax group, you'd have to add contains=#Spell, e.g. for the texStatement group, that would be:
:syn match texStatement "\\\a\+" contains=#Spell
But with that, you'd still have to add all "good" statements to your spell file. If you just want to highlight certain "bad" words, you can define a contained match:
:syn match texBadStatement "theat" containedin=texStatement
And then link to the error or bad spell highlighting:
:hi link texBadStatement SpellBad
Put those commands into ~/.vim/after/syntax/tex.vim to make them persistent.
I'm not a Latex specialist. If the texStatement group is wrong, you need to find out which syntax group causes the highlighting. :syn list shows all active groups, but it's easier when you install the SyntaxAttr.vim - Show syntax highlighting attributes of character under cursor plugin.
I'm trying to figure out how to highlight a specific portion of a match in vim.
Given the following example rule (taken from the coffeescript syntax file source):
syn match coffeeExtendedOp /\%(\S\s*\)\#<=[+\-*/%&|\^=!<>?.]\+\|[-=]>\|--\|++\|:/ display
This regular expression matches various coffeescript operators. The operators are highlighted (in my vimrc) like this:
hi Operator guifg=#ff0000
For example, since coffeeExtendedOp is linked to coffeeOperator which is linked to Operator, in the above source file. This all works, but I'm wondering how to specifically highlight the ++ operator matched in the above syn match with a different color, say blue, within my vimrc (that is, without altering the original source file above). I'm simply wondering if this is possible.
EDIT: I think the rules are placed under a cluster, so perhaps that's why it's not affecting anything. Is there a way to access the rule within the cluster?
EDIT: Question was clarified.
Solution:
syn match plusplus /++/ contained containedin=coffeeExtendedOp display
hi plusplus guifg=#0000ff
The problem now is that this only works when I run them as commands in vim, but not when I put it in my vimrc file. Any ideas? Could it be that the stuff is hidden behind the cluster? But then why is it visible in vim through a command? I tried including the syntax file but it didn't seem to have any effect.
Looking at the coffee.vim you linked to it seems like the dot belongs to the coffeeDotAccess syntax item. So you can highlight it just by doing this:
:hi coffeeDotAccess ctermfg=blue
I'm going to guess a bit at what you need. (I don't speak Coffeescript and your sample regex is way too complicated for me to start reading at the moment).
Transparent syntax items
You could have a look at transparent syntax rules: (http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/usr_44.html)
In a C language file you would like to highlight the () text after a "while"
differently from the () text after a "for". In both of these there can be
nested () items, which should be highlighted in the same way. You must make
sure the () highlighting stops at the matching ). This is one way to do this:
:syntax region cWhile matchgroup=cWhile start=/while\s*(/ end=/)/
\ contains=cCondNest
:syntax region cFor matchgroup=cFor start=/for\s*(/ end=/)/
\ contains=cCondNest
:syntax region cCondNest start=/(/ end=/)/ contained transparent
Partial matches in regex
If you really just meant highlighting submatches, have a look at the the
\zs start match
\ze end match
In short,
:match Error /foo\zsbar\zered/
would highlight only 'bar' in 'foobarred'
VIM: Is it possible to change the color of these symbols:
~!%^&*()-+=[]{},.<>?:/;
like Visual Studio does?
The C/C++ syntaxes are defined in syntax/c.vim and syntax/cpp.vim. If you're using Linux, the main syntax directory is in /usr/share/vimXX/, where XX is the version (e.g. mine are in vim72). I don't know about installation directories on other OSes, but I'm sure you can find it. I'd suggest making a copy of these and placing them in your user vim directory (for example, in Linux, $HOME/.vim/syntax/c.vim and so on). You can then add whatever you like.
The C++ syntax sources the C syntax, so any symbols you want highlighted in both should go in c.vim, and anything for C++ only should be in cpp.vim.
To get syntax highlighting for specific symbols, you'll need to use a syntax match statement, something like:
syn match cUserSpecialCharacter display "[~!%^&*()-+=[\]{},.<>?:;]"
syn match cUserSpecialCharacter display "/[^*/]"me=e-1
syn match cUserSpecialCharacter display "/$"
I called it cUserSpecialCharacter since cCharacter and cSpecialCharacter are already used. The second and third matches are a bit of a kludge to highlight '/' without it matching comment prefixes, which would then override the comment highlighting and break everything. The "display" option tells Vim that it doesn't need to look for this match if it's not going to be displayed - see :help syn-display for an explanation if you like!
Once you've defined a syntax match, you can link it to a highlight group, for example:
hi def link cUserSpecialCharacter cCharacter
This will put it in with the already defined cCharacter group, so it'll get whatever highlighting that gets - in this case, Character. You can see a nice list of highlight groups at the bottom of c.vim for examples. If you really want, you can also hardcode a highlight by doing something like:
hi cUserSpecialCharacter term=reverse ctermfg=15 ctermbg=1 guifg=#ffffff guibg=#800000
(Arbitrary example - my current highlighting for the Error group.) See :help hi for more information on this, or simply :hi to see the list of defined highlighting - plenty of examples. I'd recommend against doing this, though, since it won't change with color schemes.
Yes, you need to edit the C color theme in vimfiles/colors/c.vim I don't know all the theme options one can use, but I'm sure they are documented on http://vim.org/