On Fri, 2 Nov 2007, John Culleton wrote:
On Friday 02 November 2007 08:12:31 am richard.stephens@converteam.com wrote:
I have downloaded the latest Notepad++ and ConTeXt settings as suggested by Professor Hamid and I'm enjoying the experience of using them!
However, I do not really like the colour scheme and tried to alter the background colours by editing "Application Data/Notepad++/UserDefineLang.xml", shutting down Notepad++ and starting up again (via Npp.bat), but no change. I also tried editing the "tex" entry in "Application Data/Notepad++/stylers.xml", but no joy. I tried going to menu item Settings - Style Configurator, but Context isn't in the list of languages.
How can I alter the default colour settings for ConTeXt, please?
Richard Stephens
You might have more luck with Vim/Gvim which has an open-ended syntax highlighting scheme with almost 500 files named e.g., cobol.vim in the subdirectory syntax. It will do automatic sensing by suffix but you can manually select one too. It even has one for Context.
You can modify the syntax files if you like or create new ones but either task looks like an all-day project to me.
I would like to disagree here. I love vim, and use it for all my editing tasks, but it is not easy to write a syntax file for vim. Simple syntax is easy, but getting correct syntax highlighting for context is a hard thing. I have been writing one syntax file for almost a year now, but it is not perfect. The difficulty is doing context sensitive highlighting. For example, for \setupwhatver[key=value] I want setupwhatever to be blue, and key=value to be red. Now sometimes, value is be a series of context commands entered as key={value}. In that case, I want everything in brackets to be hightlighted as the default context hightlighting (rather than red), so that if I make a mistake in the long statement, the syntax highlighting can help me. This is ok, but things gets hard when you want to do \setupwhatever[before={\setupsomething[key=value]}]. And now, the same problem for key=value setting in the nested setup command. There are other things which are difficult. \type is one command which I can never get to work. It is easy to get things like \type|command| or \type+command+ or \type{command} to give the correct highlighting, but something like \type{\command{parameter}} is hard. I could not find enough hooks in the vim syntax highlighting to get everything that I want. I have not really looked at how configurable the highlighting features of other languages are. But what I want to say here is that writing syntax highlighting for context is hard. And it is certainly not a one day project. Aditya