On 26/4/2006, at 18:25, Plessl Christian wrote:
[...] Is there a way to implement this in Textmate without either: a) modifying all programming language modes with the new rule, or b) creating new language bundles C (+fixme), Java (+fixme) etc. that include the language definitions for C/Java and add the new syntax highlighting rule?
There is not, no. But a solution will appear, and is conceptually rather simple IMO.
Currently the scope selector is disabled for language grammars, now imagine it wasn’t, and that selector decided where to inject the grammar!
That would allow to tear out the PHP, Ruby, and Smarty handling of the HTML grammar, and instead have that with the language. Likewise it allows the mentioned FIXME/TODO grammar to be in the TODO bundle, and be injected based on a scope selector -- disabling the TODO bundle would then disable this injection automatically.
There is a scope addition which will make this more powerful, namely exposing arbitrary file attributes in the scope (which scope selectors can then target), that way, the Java bundle can inject <% java %> support to HTML files only when the file type attribute is ‘jsp’, and the Subversion bundle can inject the various svn keywords only when the SCM attribute is ‘svn’.
Probably I should ask this question on the mailing list, should I?
I cc’ed the mailing list, seeing how others probably would enjoy reading my reply to this (though I think I have hinted at this earlier, maybe only on IRC).
I hope to have the file attributes exposed in the scope already in 2.0 (this will then also allow all SCM bundles to use the same key equivalents), but grammar injection is probably at earlist 2.1 or so… the technical challenge isn’t that big, but I would also need to extend scope selectors to allow an injection to stop after a given depth, so to speak -- and I also need to only focus on one thing at a time, to actually get anything done :)
Kind regars Allan