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I'd (still) like to see additional attributes added to the possibilities of syntax higlighting, especially bold, italics and underline.

Stephan

Excellent suggestion!

I've seen this feature in other text editors, like Context (http://fixedsys.com/context/).
I'd love to italicize comment lines and make other keywords bold.

skaemper wrote:I'd (still) like to see additional attributes added to the possibilities of syntax higlighting, especially bold, italics and underline.

Stephan

Yes, agreed

And strikethrough would be great too, please!

I have also requested the ability to include spaces in the SingleComment field e.g. >SingleComment = " . "
Rational: Some JCL/ECL treat anything on a line after a space period space sequence as a comment.

skaemper wrote:I'd (still) like to see additional attributes added to the possibilities of syntax higlighting, especially bold, italics and underline.

Stephan

and make sure they are implemented...correctly...

There are too few really distinct colors to handle my needs... I haven't found a background color that I like for any of the Keyword sets, and an addition like this would be welcome.... but my favorite font is Terminal 8, so can any of the above mentioned attributes be used with that?

D

"Rich" syntax highlighting is also particularly helpful when printing out code on a black and white printer.

I'm using TextPad for all my ASCII editing work, except PHP coding, just because TextPad can't highlight syntax in bold. That's why I need this feature very much. I hope that this will be included in version 4.x (=free upgrade for me).

It would be nice if I could define a simple expression to recognise a part of grammer...for example, in assembly you have lables that always end with a : (or :: for global). I can't figure out how to get the syntax to recognise this sort of thing. A similar case is MSDOS-Batch files. Lables are always preceeded by a :. So if there was something like

lable = ^[^ ]+:
for assembly

or

lable = ^[ ]+:.+
for DOS

In fact if we could use regular expressions to define our own grammer that would be great. I could use one to define mulitline comments for example...because in assembly you can say "COMMENT x" where x can be any character and the comment extend to its next occurance. This is simple to provide a regular expression for, but tedious to define each time you find some code that uses a new x character.

So it would be nice if anytime we added a keyword to the header of the syntax file it became a new color configurable item in the sytax highlight list. This is a larger shift, though...

-chip

I don't want to cross-post the detail so here's a link to a related comment I've added to another thread - http://www.textpad.com/forum/viewtopic. ... 5835#15835

Would be really neat and easy to implement.

Another thing (I haven't found this mentioned yet) I'd like is to have the background color extend to the right edge of the window in the absence of syntax that resets it. My personal use for this is in coloring comments. I like to use the background color to provide a very clear distinction between text and code, especially for block comments that begin files and functions. However, this isn't very effective when the right edge of the comment looks ragged. If the background color extended to the right edge of the window or page as long as the comment had not been terminated by a non-newline character then this provides very bold delineation between major blocks of code.

--Steve

I want to be able to merge syntax definition files.

i know this thread went dead a while ago, but i thought i would add a thought

what about being able to define "help hints" to a syntax file for information about the item to be highlighted... for example

[keywords 1] /* php syntax file */
echo {echo( string arg1 [, string argn...]) [Output one or more strings]}
md5 {md5(string str) [Calculate the md5 hash of a string]}

so when user hovers their mouse over the highlighted word in their code the helphint text will show what is added within the {}'s in the syntax file.

-Echo