yak shaving

(id­iomat­ic) Any ap­par­ent­ly use­less ac­tiv­i­ty which, by al­low­ing you to over­come in­ter­me­di­ate dif­fi­cul­ties, al­lows you to solve a larg­er prob­lem.

A while ago, I wrote how I im­ple­ment­ed a gener­ic syn­tax high­lighter for PyQt us­ing Pyg­ments.

I got a re­quest for such a fea­ture in Mar­ave, so I digged that code and... it's freak­ing use­less. It's just too slow for rea­son­able use.

So, that yak's hair is all grown up again, and I just got this new pair of scis­sors!

The goal is a way to high­light syn­tax in a QPlain­TextE­d­it that:

• Does­n't re­quire pro­­gram­ming to add a new high­­­lighter

• Does­n't re­quire pro­­gram­ming to add a new col­or scheme

• Does­n't re­quire me to spend a year writ­ing high­­­lighters for ex­ist­ing lan­guages

• Is fast enough

A quick google shows that for C++ you can use Source high­light qt which is based on GNU source high­light.

Alas, no python bind­ing that I could find. So, let's write one!

Here it is: http://­mar­ave.­google­code.­com/svn/trunk­/­mar­ave/high­light/

And here's a screen­shot of the de­mo pro­gram run­ning, show­ing it­self in its en­tire­ty:

You can cre­ate a col­or scheme us­ing CSS, a lan­guage def­i­ni­tion is a text file, there are a bazil­lion al­ready writ­ten, it seems to be fast enough.

So, an­oth­er yak shaved, an­oth­er fea­ture (not fin­ished!) for Mar­ave