Hi Leandro, On 02/05/2011 06:36 PM, Leandro Hermida wrote: > Just wondering if there is a feature roadmap for Padre, particularly > on syntax highlighting capabilities? I really love the IDE except for > the syntax highlighting capabilities... Scintilla really sucks and and > you are always forced to revert to it when you file is anything bigger > than a tiny amount of code or is there a workaround to force it to use > the much better Kate or PPIx in all cases?
This is quite a difficult problem to solve. All known alternatives for syntax highlighting have some serious downsides: - Scintilla isn't great at parsing perl. Particularly, the version we have access to doesn't recognize a lot of features from recent versions of perl. This would be somewhat improved if the most recent versions of Scintilla were available through Wx. - The Perl & (Kate|PPI) based lexer/parsers are simply too slow to be used for large documents. This is why you see Padre automatically fall back to the faster highlighter for large documents. I believe you can set the threshold for this in the configuration. I'm sure somebody else on this list knows exactly how. If in doubt, grep through Padre::Config. Personally, I'm a vim user and must say that vim syntax highlighting for Perl isn't the worst. But extracting such functionality from a project such as vim is probably prohibitive. If I remember correctly, the Kate highlighter is huge amounts of auto-generated Perl code from some templates taken from Kate. I am not sure if the original generator code is still available and/or maintained, but I do wonder whether generating C code from the templates and then compiling that as an XS module would make the Kate highlighter fast enough to be used in place of Scintilla? Alas, I won't be able tackle this, but since I thought about it some way back, I figured sharing my thoughts might help jump start somebody else's efforts. Best regards, Steffen _______________________________________________ Padre-dev mailing list Padre-dev@perlide.org http://mail.perlide.org/mailman/listinfo/padre-dev
