[Geany-Users] newbie getting started with filedef

[Lex Trotman]

> Clearly I am missing something that I am not doing correctly to get the syntax highlighting to work.

Yes. :)

Syntax highlighting is done by the Scintilla (the editing widget,
separate project) lexers, not by Geany.  The styling just maps the
Scintilla syntactic entities to styles, it does not define the
entities.  The lexers are C++ code, not something that can be defined
by users outside the configuration the lexer code allows.

Some lexers allow keyword lists as you have noticed, but thats within
the framework of the language being analysed, not to define a whole
new language (well, unless your new language is extremely similar).

> Then there is the question of where to go for the symbols.

Symbols are defined by parsers imported from the universal ctags
project, and those parsers are C code.  Because they parse language
semantics to get symbols they are much less flexible than the
highlighting lexers.

>
> A noddy guide to getting started, with examples would be very useful. Thanks in advance.

There is no example because lexers are not part of the Geany project,
they are just imported from Scintilla every time a new version is
included.  As the manual says you can define a new filetype using an
existing lexer, and/or parser, but you can't define a new one without
compiling new code.

Cheers
Lex

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