On Aug 10, 2006, at 4:27 PM, thomas Aylott wrote:

On Aug 10, 2006, at 8:08 AM, Luc Heinrich wrote:

Now, have you guys seen the XCode 3.0 screenshot showing the new "ribbon scope highlighter" ?

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/xcode.html>

Hows this for starters?

http://flickr.com/photos/thomas_aylott/211990629/

Am I the only one who thinks that this is a sledgehammer approach to highlighting structure, and that it will interfere with syntax highlighting (I make occasional use of background colors)?

Some time ago a different approach to the same goal was discussed that involved highlighting leading tabs. It is relatively easy to add to all languages, Perl already has it:

http://gerd.knops.org/tabHighlightExample.png

The only downside at this point is that for soft tabs the tab size is hardcoded, but I guess Allan could add something to fix that.

In most languages all that is needed is to include this into the syntax (replacing the 4 in ' {4}' with the default tab width for the language):

{ name = 'meta.leading-tabs';

begin = '^(?=(\t| {4}))';

end = '(?=[^\t\s])';

patterns = (

{ match = '(\t| {4})(\t| {4})?';

captures =

{ 1 = { name = 'meta.odd-tab'; };

2 = { name = 'meta.even-tab'; };

};

}

);

},

Gerd