filePro syntax coloring

[Jay Ashworth]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Brian K. White" <brian at aljex.com>

> > The reverse video on the colons is really jarring, at least to me;
> > where can I change that?
> >
> > And there *is* a time when I'd like them to be in reverse: if there
> > aren't three of them on a line. Is the engine that smart?
> 
> The particular color choices were really the last thing I was thinking
> very hard about, since they are easy to change to whatever you want. I
> went through a few different palettes just within the time frame of that
> old page. The hard part is getting the thing to recognize different
> elements reasonably well without being able to do it the only really
> correct way, which would be to have a copy of fp's own actual parsing
> code.

Indeed.  It does seem to do a pretty good job.

> One reason they are intentionally jarring is just to distinguish them
> from colons that appear in the text, except I didn't get as far as
> magically handling the ^A's or whatever they are to display as : and be
> entered as : yet be ^A in the file. I think the engine CAN do fancy
> things like that, just *I* can't. It's like filepro edit syntax times
> pi hundred. Whatever you can imagine, it probably CAN do it. (we'll pretend
> not to think about something simple like handling a " as text for the
> sake of the joke for now ;)

Indeed.  :-)  That said, I assume that implies if I scan through the .vim
file not in plugins, that I'll find a stanza where all the color defs live,
and I can just change the relevant ones.

> The main reason of course is just that you need some way to make the 3
> sections really stand out, because I couldn't get the multi-line output
> like I wanted. And there are only so many colors available without
> changing the bg color, and in fact I really wanted to change the bg
> colors too for the different sections, so you run out of unique and
> visibly unambiguous combinations quickly. Plus I was possibly too crazy
> in trying to provide different colors for every little recognizable
> thing, like color and keystroke codes within text strings... or like
> recognizing all the comparison operators, but only when they were
> comparison operators instead of variables with the same names...)

Well, maybe *you* need them to stand out.  :-)

> But yes the color values are all easy to change. The syntax files are
> plain text and not too terribly unreadable.

Cool.

> ...ahh, I see I did not set any explicit colors but just defined a bunch
> of things to recognize, and then used vim default names for common
> objects and let vim use it's default colors.

Ah.

> So, I define how to recognize a "fileproComment" and then I tell vim
> that a "fileproComment" is a thing of type "Comment" and vim has a
> default color it uses for "Comment". And, a user can load some custom
> theme, which will define some other color for comments, and it'll work
> for prc files as well as any other files that don't set their own
> explicit colors.

So that will probably work for everything maybe except those colons?
 
> So, in this file
> http://www.aljex.com/fp/vim/syntax/filepro.vim
> you want to change this line near the bottom:
> 
> HiLink fileproDelimiter Todo
> 
> to
> 
> HiLink fileproDelimiter <something else>
> 
> "Todo" and <something else> are defined I guess somewhere in
> /usr/share/vim/vim73/colors?, with several possible/optional other
> places that override, like /usr/share/vim/site/colors and probably
> something in the users home dir. But default.vim in there says it
> doesn't do anything so I don't know off hand where the default
> :colorscheme comes from.

Aha! (It's a Spenser thing.)

> It looks like now you can ignore the part of the readme about editing
> $VIM/menu.vim Looks like the menu of the list of available file types
> is either automatically generated or not shown at all now.

Yeah; I saw that I couldn't find that stanza, and skipped it with 
apparently impunity.

> Also the directions should really be converted to some portable
> equivalent of site-specific local files, or user specific files in
> their home dir instead of editing the vendor/package supplied files in
> /usr/share
> 
> But I just tried it minus the menu.vim part just to see if it even still
> worked, and it colorizes prc files, but damned if I know where the
> colors are defined.

Got it.

No thoughts, then, on whether it's possible to have the delimiters be
a different color if there are != 3 of them?

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink                       jra at baylink.com
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