Re: How to get syntax highlighting working??

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com>]

On Dec 31, 10:28am, Wayne Davison wrote:
} 
} While playing with this syntax highlighting code, I've come to the
} conclusion that it would be much nicer to have a hook where the zle code
} asks for a changed line to be highlighted.

I've been thinking for a couple of days now about some related ideas.

I loaded the zsh-syntax-highlighting script from github but found it
to be *agonizingly* slow when running zed (or on any other significant
multi-line buffer), because it recomputes the colorization of the whole
buffer in shell code on every keystroke -- including movement up or
down in the buffer.

Several changes could improve this; (1) don't re-highlight if the buffer
hasn't changed [your edit to _zsh_highlight-zle-buffer]; (2) highlight
incrementally based on $CURSOR rather than starting over with a fresh
${(z)BUFFER} on every change; and (3) get some help from the C code,
which presently isn't available.

This is exactly the reason that completion has so many helper builtins
to figure out the context around the cursor position.  Perhaps the code
for completion could be repurposed for this; in fact perhaps a way to
approach it without hacking new C code directly, is to restructure the
colorize-zle-buffer function such that it becomes a completion widget
(one which always succeeds without adding any matches), and then invoke
that with "zle colorize-zle-buffer" instead of a direct call.

} This avoids having to create functions for an ever-changing plethora
} of zle functions, and makes things like push-line, yank, yank-pop,
} delete-char-or-list, and who-knows-what-else Just Work (all of which
} have issues when using override widgets).

Aside:  It appears the thread beginning users/15493 then workers/28369
never went anywhere (about making the zle hooks into arrays of function
or widget names).

} Here's a patch for zsh:
} 
}   http://opencoder.net/zle-set-highlight-hook.patch
} 
} Thoughts?  I really like this single hook point for highlighting.

Yes, this makes good sense.

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