I don't have much programming knowledge. What would an extension code look like to simply format (highlight) the entire snippet after a triple dollar sign "$$$" on VSCode?
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I want to make a plugin for a language for the Intellij Idea IDE. The language has been developped using Eclipse Xtext and is open source. A plugin already exists for Eclipse.
My goal is to port this language to Intellij Idea. I want to be able to use Intellij to create source files, to have the specific syntax highlighting and to be able to compile and run programs written with this language.
Is there a simple way to generate the Intellij Idea plugin using the Xtext project?
If not is there an efficient solution to be able to have the specific syntax highlighting in Intellij? (an automatic way if possible, I would prefer not rewriting everything everytime the Xtext project is updated)
Short answer
Yes, with a bit of work.
Long Answer
Sadly, Xtext uses antlr in the background and IntelliJ use their own grammar kit based on Parsing Expression Grammars. As such, the parsing and editor code generated by XText, as you might have guessed, will not work.
In order to get your language working in IntelliJ you will need to:
Create grammar *.bnf file
Generate lexer *.flex file, possibly tweak it and then run JFlex generator
Implement helper classes to provide, among others, file recognition via file extension, syntax highlighting, color settings page, folding, etc.
The *.flex file is generated from the bnf. Luckily, most of the classes in step 3 follow a very similar structure so they can be easily generated (more on that later). So basically, if you manage to generate the *.bnf file, you are 80% there.
Although from different technologies, the syntax of bnf files is very similar to XText files. I recently migrated some antlr grammars to IntelliJ's bnf and I had to do very small changes. Thus, it should be possible to autogenerate the bnf files from your XText ones.
That brings me back to point 3. Using XTend, Epsilon's EGL, or similar, it would be easy to generate all the boiler plate classes. As part of the migration I mentioned before I also did this. I am in the process of making the code public, so I will post it here when done and add some details.
I am working on a Language Package in Atom and am curious about how to name items. For some reason, things like keyword.operator.langname as the name, yet it still doesn't highlight. I checked the HTML source and the span is there, but no coloring. I even compared my code to other languages code and the styles.less file used in atom and it appears that it should work. What am I doing wrong?
Also, is there any good place that has a list of the selectors as I can't seem to find any docs on them.
The regex I am using for anyone who is curious is:
'match': ':',
'name': 'keyword.operator.langname'
(langname being a psuedonym for the name of the language.)
It's likely that the syntax theme you're using doesn't support it. I know that keyword.operator shows up in language-javascript, but when I look at one-dark-syntax as an example, the coloring for that class combination only exists in language-specific files. I feel like the best path for people designing small language packages is to look in core syntax theme packages to figure out which classes to use. Don't get too hung up on the actual class names, since your user won't see them at all unless they look at them in the dev tools.
I've recently developed a domain-specific language using flex and bison. I would like to create a user interface for editing script files using this language. In particular I would like to have common functionalities such as file handling, menus, buttons, syntax highlighting, error checking and so on. Do you know any tool which can be used to develop such kind of application? I would prefer one which can give me a prototype rapidly.
such as file handling, menus, buttons, syntax highlighting, error
checking
I think that file handling, menus, buttons and highlighting are your least concerns. What you call "error checking" on the other hand. That can be a tough nut. I will try to give you some pointers to how you can (in a somewhat primitive manner) detect errors on the fly as the user inputs source code in the editor.
I assume you wish for something like Eclipses (for java at least) real time analysis of the written code in the editor? I'm not familiar with how Eclipse work internally but this is probably done by some pre-compilation process that processes all source code again and again as you change it.
One way to prototype this (and indeed build a non-prototype as well) would be to use Flex and Bison, and I notice you already is familiar with these tools. You can build you grammar and create action code for all interesting parts so you can find syntax deviations fairly easy. After this you make your editor run the flex and bison generated c-code as the user writes the source code in you IDE and have some way of displaying the output. Either in a terminal-like status window or directly in the text-editing field (as Eclipse does) (the latter case is probably a pain to build but by no means impossible and would give you IDE a professional touch).
Suppose you would like to build an IDE for ADA 95 the following Flex and Bison (Actually Lex and Yacc) code could help you do exactly this (it's a decent syntax analyzer that reports errors (what and where)):
http://www.adaic.org/resources/add_content/standards/95lrm/lexer9x.l
http://www.adaic.org/resources/add_content/standards/95lrm/grammar9x.y
Hope this helps.
Edit:
to have cool error highlighting and such in the text-editor field of your IDE you could let your bison generated syntax analyser generate something thats easy to parse, like XML, that contains the type of error and where it lies (row and column for example) and then use that to display the errors... you simply embed an XML parser in the IDE (lots of free one available) and extract the data you need and change the display accordingly... That shouldn't be rocket science when I think about it.
I have a project in Eclipse where I have an editor for a custom language. I am using ANTLR to generate the compiler for it. What I need is to add content assist to the editor.
The input is a source code in the custom language, and the position of the character where the user requested content assist. The source code is most of time incomplete as the user can ask for content assist any time. What I need is to calculate the list of possible tokens that are valid for the given position.
It is possible to write a custom code to do the calculation, but that code would have to be manually kept in sync with the grammar. I figured the parser is doing something similar. It has to be able to determine at a given context what are the acceptable tokens. Is it possible to "reuse" that? What is the best practice in creating content assist anyway?
Thanks,
Balint
Have a look at Xtext. Xtext uses Antlr3 under the hood and provides content assist for the Antlr based languages. Have a look especially into package org.eclipse.xtext.ui.editor.contentassist.
You may consider to redefine your grammar with Xtext, which would provide the content assist out-of-the-box. It is not possible to reuse the Antlr grammar of a custom language.
Is there any kind of standard across editor and IDEs for expanding snippets?
Specifically, I would like to write a patch for an API that would provide a code snippet database that could be imported into different editors/IDEs and expand on demand.
I am writing something for vim (my editor of choice so that)
:expand theme_some_function
would then insert
/**
* Override of theme_some_function($&arg)
**/
MYMODULE_some_function(&$arg1) {
// contents of the function go here
}
which is how you override a function in Drupal.
Originally I was writing this so that it would go find the file through ctags and copy the function and s/foo/bar/ what needs to be changed. It was suggested that I could expand this to other editors, so I was wondering if there was a standard that I might use.
But in general, is there any kind of editor standard that might give me ideas about opportunities to write something for many editors at once?
There isn't really any such editor standard, no.
I've not found any such standard. But here are a few points for exploration.
• Microsoft publishes a spec for an XML-based format of code snippets.
Code Snippets Schema Reference (Visual Studio 2012)
• Wikipedia has an article on code snippets but makes no mention of standards.
• This web page for Code Collector Pro (Mac OS X app) mentions:
Support for .snippet Files – A new common file format for all snippet managers
…but provides no information or links about such a format.