Re: Notepad++ colour settings

[Aditya Mahajan <adityam@umich.edu>]

On Fri, 2 Nov 2007, John Culleton wrote:

> On Friday 02 November 2007 08:12:31 am richard.stephens@converteam.com wrote:
>> I have downloaded the latest Notepad++ and ConTeXt settings as suggested
>> by Professor Hamid and I'm enjoying the experience of using them!
>>
>> However, I do not really like the colour scheme and tried to alter the
>> background colours by editing "Application
>> Data/Notepad++/UserDefineLang.xml", shutting down Notepad++ and starting
>> up again (via Npp.bat), but no change.  I also tried editing the "tex"
>> entry in "Application Data/Notepad++/stylers.xml", but no joy.
>> I tried going to menu item Settings - Style Configurator, but Context
>> isn't in the list of languages.
>>
>> How can I alter the default colour settings for ConTeXt, please?
>>
>> Richard Stephens
>
> You might have more luck with Vim/Gvim which has an open-ended syntax
> highlighting scheme with almost 500 files named e.g., cobol.vim in the
> subdirectory syntax. It will do automatic sensing by suffix but you can
> manually select one too.  It even has one for Context.
>
> You can modify the syntax files if you like or create new ones but either
> task looks like an all-day project to me.

I would like to disagree here. I love vim, and use it for all my editing 
tasks, but it is not easy to write a syntax file for vim. Simple syntax is 
easy, but getting correct syntax highlighting for context is a hard thing. 
I have been writing one syntax file for almost a year now, but it is not 
perfect. The difficulty is doing context sensitive highlighting. For 
example, for

\setupwhatver[key=value]

I want setupwhatever to be blue, and key=value to be red. Now sometimes, 
value is be a series of context commands entered as key={value}. In that 
case, I want everything in brackets to be hightlighted as the default 
context hightlighting (rather than red), so that if I make a mistake in 
the long statement, the syntax highlighting can help me. This is ok, but 
things gets hard when you want to do

\setupwhatever[before={\setupsomething[key=value]}].

And now, the same problem for key=value setting in the nested setup 
command.

There are other things which are difficult. \type is one command which I 
can never get to work. It is easy to get things like \type|command| or 
\type+command+ or \type{command} to give the correct highlighting, but 
something like \type{\command{parameter}} is hard.

I could not find enough hooks in the vim syntax highlighting to get 
everything that I want. I have not really looked at how configurable the 
highlighting features of other languages are. But what I want to say here 
is that writing syntax highlighting for context is hard. And it is 
certainly not a one day project.

Aditya
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