[Geany] Adding New Languages/Filetypes

[John Gabriele]

Hi Faustin,

This question comes up a lot. Maybe there should be a short faq page
on the Geany site, in addition to the manual.

Geany uses the Scintilla component for its filetype-specific stuff --
which includes syntax highlighting. If you want to add a new filetype,
it means you need to write a Scintilla lexer for it. That's done in
C++. Of course, to get a new filetype in Emacs, you also need to write
it yourself -- but in elisp instead of C++.

This is in contrast to another well-known GTK+ editor, gEdit, which
does not use Scintilla, and (I think) uses XML files and regexen to
create new filetypes. Not sure how well their system works out in
practice.

I think Geany includes all the available Scintilla lexers, so if it's
not in Geany, it's very likely not readily available with Scintilla
itself. You might inquire on the Scintilla ML if anyone is working on
one, and if not, you might endeavor to write one yourself.

---John



On Dec 5, 2007 11:35 AM, Faustin Lammler <lfaustin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Dear All,
> >       I have just seen the latest Geany, having last seen it about a year
> > ago, and am interested in possibly using it as a standard editior/ide on a
> > bootable cd/dvd system we are developing for students. The ideal is to
> have
> > a simple GUI which they only have to learn once but can cope with the
> > multiple languages they encounter. Currently we use Emacs + others, but
> > would like a more IDE looking GUI. Geany looks as though it has the
> > workings but I have been trying to add other languages/templates etc. Do I
> > understand that this is impossible by just adding them to the .conf, and
> > adding filetypes.XXX files, e.g. they are not automatically picked up? or
> > am I missing something?
> >
> >   Many Thanks for any help, the package looks really nice
> >
> >    regards
> >
> >     Peter
> >
>
> Same question...
>
>  Faustin
>
> PS : is there a repositories where we can find some other filestypes (smarty
> language in my case)
>
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