TEXTMATE 3 HOW TO
I’ve shown here how to add a small snippet to the HTML grammar to allow syntax highlighting of sourcecode delimited by special blocks. Language support in TextMate is a very complex task, and one that cannot be adequately covered in a single post. Here’s what a snippet of Java embedded in a Markdown blog post looked like without this change: Once the line is added and you press Test, the Java highlighting beings to work.
(Remember, we have to actually add it to the HTML grammar within the Bundle Editor, not just the TextMate window with the grammar inside of it). I have to escape the brackets due to the fact that they have a special meaning within regular expressions ( matches any vowel, while \ matches the literal string ).īy adding this line to the top of the patterns, it is run before any of the others. I look for the literal string to start the pattern, and then the literal string The important thing to look at is the list of patterns defined. Take a look through the grammar, but don’t get bogged down in the details. The document should look a lot nicer after this step: In order to force TextMate to interpret this as a language grammar, you must click the item in the lower middle that says “Plain Text” and choose “Language Grammar” from the dropdown box. When you paste the text into the document, the text is unstyled and interpreted as plain text. The first thing you should do, and which I found out the hard way, is copy all that text and paste it into a new document. You’ll be presented with a rather inscrutable, unstyled document to the right. Open up the HTML language definition file by going to Bundles -> Bundle Editor -> Edit Languages, or via the shortcut ⌃ ⌥ ⌘L, and choose the HTML option. All we need to do is ensure that text between the java tags is considered to be part of the source.java scope, and everything will just work.įirst, let us look at a sample grammar file. Since someone has already done the hard work of creating a language definition for Java and for creating all of the snippets that support it, we want to leverage this body of work. The reason is that some scope selectors can target the more general case ( scope), whereas those concerned with java can target the more specific scope ( java.scope). (See this article on Scope selectors for more.) For instance, all the Java snippets are defined as only being active in the source.java scope.Īs an aside, you might wonder why the scope is called source.java as opposed to java.scope. Snippets can be targeted to only run when within a certain scope.It provides syntax highlighting, as certain scopes are associated with certain colors.The scope determines whether text is spellchecked or not (a top level scope of source is not spell checked one that is text will be).The scope is extremely important for many reasons. For instance, the Java language grammar defines a scope for comments, a scope for control characters, and so on and so forth.
TEXTMATE 3 SERIES
In essence, a language defines a series of rules mapping patterns to scopes.
The language support in TextMate is extremely powerful, but it’s a little complicated to get started. Let’s get started by looking at how language grammars work in TextMate. While the sourcecode comes out fine in the final post, it would be nice to have the syntax highlighting show up from within the Markdown view (i.e. WordPress has the ability to syntax highlight and provide a nice monospaced version of sourcecode within a post if it’s delimited by tags. Why is this useful? My workflow for producing blog posts is often to write the post in TextMate using the Markdown markup language, which I then convert to HTML.
TEXTMATE 3 CODE
Today I’m going to show how to modify one of the TextMate language files in order to add support for Java code within HTML text. One great feature of TextMate is its extreme customizability. I’ve blogged about TextMate a few times in the past, and with good reason – it’s an extremely versatile, light weight, powerful text editor for the Mac.
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