[TxMt] Configuring syntax highlighting programmatically

[Allan Odgaard]

On 7 Apr 2008, at 20:09, Daniel Sadilek wrote:

> [...] is there any way to programmatically configure syntax  
> highlighting?
> What I want to achieve is that a user can configure pairs of string  
> and color. All occurences of the string should be highlighted in the  
> given color.

Are your grammar already assigning different scopes to these different  
elements?

If so, I assume what you want is to augment the current theme with  
custom colors that the user sets up in your editor!?!

If you look e.g. in the Diff bundle you will see that among its  
preferences it has some to define colors for added and removed text.

I think conceptually it is the same you want to do. So while the  
following does break a few “rules” what I would suggest is to have the  
color editor placed in a custom bundle which also contains color  
preferences for your additional elements.

Then when the editor is launched (from within TextMate) it can use the  
TM_BUNDLE_PATH environment variable to get the path for these  
preferences, edit them, and issue a ‘tell app "TextMate" to reload  
bundles’ AppleScript command to have TextMate re-read modifications  
done.

You may want to “touch” the Preferences folder in the bundle, to  
ensure TextMate sees the changes (when it (re)loads bundles it favors  
the cache if a folder date hasn’t been updated since last read).