Community

Freshly send as enhancement request.
If the pressure is strong enough, meaning enough of you request it, this might be in the next release of TP.

[...] HTML in TextPad is nice except for one thing.
Although most large css or js files will be external, it is unavoidable to have inLine style or script.
The problem is that syntax highlighting remains 'HTML' even when editing in style='' or <style></style> or <script></script>.
Gets rather confusing especially if <script> contains an opening angular bracket '<'.
Had I not noticed that htmlKit (chami.com) was able to do it, I would not mention it.
But chami's editor isn't that advanced, and I was thinking that it shouldn't be too difficult and would be extremely nice to have this or a similar feature added to TextPad.
Also, considering how commonly HTML is used, I am sure that more than I alone would benefit from and enjoy this.
As usual, I cannot not refrain from mentioning a configurable code completion dropDown as enhancement request; macros are nice but limited to keyboard combinations, which is even less when one considers that these macros work with the editor itself and are not configurable in accordance with the type of file being currently edited.
As for htmlKit, it doesn't come close to TextPad with text handling, which is why I request this.
[...]

One way to get around this for now is to put both HTML color coding and JavaScript (or VBScript if you prefer) color coding into the same .syn file. It is not a perfect solution, because, like you said, it gets confused on things like opening angular bracket '<' and comment tags in other places. But it is better than nothing.

I just want to add my voice to the plea for a configurable code completion dropDown feature as well as pop-up tags to show the syntax of common commands, like any good IDE would have. I need this so bad I have started looking at other text editors. But I really like TextPad and would prefer to stay with it.

Also, I want to add to the dead-horse beating about macro capabilites. Please, Please, Please!

Have the same problem. What I don't know is whether the current behaviour is a limitation of the language used in the .syn files or a too-simplistic .syn file? I have never had the time to look in detail at writing syn files so I don't know the answer.

Same remark as the <script> containing a '<' applies also to other cases too. I don't remember the example but I think it had something to do with embedded quotes in a string.

I think it is really great that TP allows you to write your own syntax highlighting for any language and I am against building special handling for a particular language into a generic text editor. But maybe Helios should actually support a limited number of well chosen syntax definitions instead of only delivering them as "samples".

"Apartment 223" replied:
> syn files are only a list of words separated by
> '[keyword x]'
> from document>classes>colors, you see what color each keyword found will be,
> that 's all there is to it ..

Hmmm, so that means the syntax highlighting is too simplistic to handle these cases. But then how does it deal with quoted strings? Is this hard-coded? Each language handles things like escaping of embedded quotes differently.

Just wondering, but I suppose it becomes a new thread if we get into a discussion on the syntax of the syntax highlighting language....