Syntax Highlighting

We need to highlight things to make them easier to find.

Syntax highlighting is commonly found in code editors, code viewers, and some shells, such as zsh. We believe that syntax highlighting makes it easier to distinguish between parts of text, making it easier to read and understand the whole text, especially if you're reading a codebase, such as Terminaux's source code.

Syntax highlighting is also available on vim for code files and for configuration files for the same reason. As a result, Terminaux also provides syntax highlighting in your prompt to make the text that you've written easier to read and understand.

To try this feature out, you can execute the console demo of Terminaux, passing the PromptHighlighted argument.

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Structure

The syntax highlighting tools provide you with functions to manage your highlighters, including registering them after getting an instance of the highlighter from its JSON representation that looks like the following:

Minimum JSON

{
    "Name": "custom",
    "Components": {
        "FirstWord": {
            "ComponentMatch": "/(?:^|(?:[.!?]\\s))(\\w+)/",
            "ComponentForegroundColor": "#00FF00",
            "ComponentBackgroundColor": "#000000",
        }
    }
}

All of your highlighters must follow this convention above to make a useful highlighter for your syntax. If done correctly, you must be able to get a registerable instance of a SyntaxHighlighting instance.

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Registration and unregistration

Registering this instance require making either a JSON file that contains the above syntax highlighter properties, or a JSON string variable, such as in this demo's source code, require getting the instance using the GetHighlighterFromJson() function. Afterwards, you can register it using RegisterHighlighter().

This registration process is necessary for your syntax highlighter to be usable in the terminal reader.

If you want to unregister a highlighter, you can use the UnregisterHighlighter() function. Be sure that you're really done with the highlighter before trying to call this function.

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Usage in terminal reader settings

You need to keep a handy copy of the instance of your highlighter so that you can use it in the terminal reader settings like this:

Demo source code

var settingsCustom = new TermReaderSettings()
{
    SyntaxHighlighterEnabled = true,
    SyntaxHighlighter = template,
};

After that, you must pass the settings instance to the Read() function to be able to recognize your highlighter. You can also use the global settings to do the same thing.

If you need to get your highlighter in another function, or if you start the reader in another function, you can use the GetHighlighter() function, passing it the name of your highlighter defined in the name part of its JSON contents, as long as it's registered.

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Saving the highlighter

You can also save your highlighter to a JSON string which you can then save to a file using GetHighlighterToJson(). You can later read it using the GetHighlighterFromJson() function.