On Wed, 23 Jan 2008 09:20:00 +0100 Andreas Tscharner andy@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