use Perl

• syntax highlighting (Score:1)

  by pshangov (3074) on 2008.10.30 11:54 (#65626) Homepage Journal

  Better syntax highlighting: Vim supports highlighting of special characters within regexes and double-quoted strings, which makes it very easy for me to see what is going on in the regex and locate small errors. No other editor on the market currently offers highlighting as rich as in vim, and this is the sole reason why I have not been able to move away from it so far (and I have tried most other IDEs). Scintilla does not offer an easy way to modify syntax highlighting rules, unless you know C (which I don't), so I do not see how that problem can be fixed by the Padre developers.

  Note: As I am writing this post I have not been able to install Padre yet, as some failure in my local Module::Build prevents me from installing the last dependencies (App::Ack and Wx::Perl::Dialog) and I am too tired to investigate this today.

  Reply to This

  • Re: (Score:2)

    by gabor (1626)

    The default perl5 syntax highlighter of scintilla might not do it for you but with Padre you can actually write your own syntax highlighter in Perl.

    So if you have the time for that, it would be great to try to implement such a thing. I'd recommend using PPI. Though Adam said it might be too slow for this purpose and he knows a bit more about PPI than I do :-), you might still beat him at his own game. That would be awesome.

    There are very naive syntax highlighters in some of the Padre::Document::* module

    --
    

    • Test automation using Perl [szabgab.com]
    • Re: (Score:1)

      by jrockway (7171)

      FWIW, I have experimented with PPI-based highlighting in emacs. It is fast enough.
      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Alias (5735)

        It may be that if we make sure to disable PPI past a certain threshold (say, more than 1 second of CPU for a reflow, which would happen at around 2000 lines) we could make it fast enough.
      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gabor (1626)

        We just found out that the version of Scintilla we are using does not support 5.10 [perlide.org] so we seriously need to look into alternative syntax highlighting.

        There is already a first version in place but it is slow.

        Could you share your results/experience/code with us?

        maybe on #padre ?

        --
        

        • Test automation using Perl [szabgab.com]
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by jrockway (7171)

    No other editor on the market currently offers highlighting as rich as in vim

    If by vim, you mean emacs. Trust me, cperl-mode is much more complete than anything vim has.