Syntax Highlighting

Syntax highlighting engine for Kate syntax definitions

Introduction

This is a stand-alone implementation of the Kate syntax highlighting engine. It's meant as a building block for text editors as well as for simple highlighted text rendering (e.g. as HTML), supporting both integration with a custom editor as well as a ready-to-use QSyntaxHighlighter sub-class.

Syntax Definition Files

This library uses Kate syntax definition files for the actual highlighting, the file format is documented here.

More than 250 syntax definition files are included, additional ones are picked up from the file system if present, so you can easily extend this by application-specific syntax definitions for example.

Out of scope

To not turn this into yet another text editor, the following things are considered out of scope:

• code folding, beyond providing folding range information
• auto completion
• spell checking
• user interface for configuration
• management of text buffers or documents

If you need any of this, check out KTextEditor.

Adding unit tests for a syntax definition

• add an input file into the autotests/input/ folder, lets call it test.

• if the file extension is not sufficient to trigger the right syntax definition, you can add an second file testname..syntax that contains the syntax definition name to enforce the use of the right extension

• do "make && make test"

• inspect the outputs found in your binary directory autotests/folding.out, autotests/html.output and autotests/output

• if ok, run in the binary folder "./autotests/update-reference-data.sh" to copy the results to the right location

• add the result references after the copying to the git