Custom filetypes (was Re: [Geany] Feature Request: IDL Support)

[Nick Treleaven]

On Wed, 23 Jan 2008 09:20:00 +0100
Andreas Tscharner <andy at vis.ethz.ch> wrote:

> Hello World,
> 
> I'd like to see syntax highligthing for IDL files in geany.

First, I'm not familiar with that, so I don't know where it's used, etc.

But after the 0.13 release I'm going to look at making Geany support
custom filetypes, so perhaps less commonly used filetypes could be done
like that, instead of the core having binary support for languages most
people don't use. Of course core support will be better, but it
can bloat Geany. Currently the stripped object files for Scintilla's
Lexers included with Geany totals 316Kb (average ~12Kb each). Then
there's the tag parsers - 101Kb total (average ~4Kb each). And there
are a lot of different filetypes we don't support.

I'm not sure how useful custom filetypes can be made, but I expect that
making them support basic keyword highlighting shouldn't be too
difficult. In theory they could also have regexes for function and
datatype tags, and maybe regexes for other syntax highlighting besides
keywords.

Regards,
Nick