id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	priority	milestone	component	version	resolution	keywords	cc	blockedby	blocking	branch_state	votes
2172	Skins to override editor syntax highlight colors	egmont		"Skins have complete control over mc's and mcview's colors, and can specify mcedit's basic colors, too. However, they have no control whatsoever over mcedit's syntax highlighting.

In ticket #2169 I've just recommended a dark-on-bright color scheme (kind of making it a ""noon commander"" instead of ""midnight commander"" :-)). However, the yellow foreground color used by many syntax definitions is quite unreadable. Moreover, once that skin is using 256 colors, I might want to leverage these colors in the syntax highligher too.

Here's my recommendation on how to improve the situation.

Currently syntax files have a direct mapping from individual keywords to colors. Example (from c.syntax):

  keyword whole if yellow
  keyword whole else yellow
  keyword \* yellow
  keyword \+ yellow
  keyword ( brightcyan
  keyword ) brightcyan

It perfectly makes sense to force ""if"" and ""else"" to have the same color, and to have ""+"" and ""-"" to have the same one. I assume it's safe to assume nobody would want to do differently. However, ""if"" and ""+"" should not necessarily be the same colors.

I recommend introducing a level of abstraction between the exact keywords and the colors: the type of the token. Syntax files already support the ""define"" keywords, it's just not being used right now. The snippet above could be modified as this:

  define builtinkeyword yellow
  define mathoperator yellow
  define parenthesis brightcyan
  keyword whole if builtinkeyword
  keyword whole else builtinkeyword
  keyword \* mathoperator
  keyword \+ mathoperator
  keyword ( parenthesis
  keyword ) parenthesis

So far no code change is required, only some refactoring in the syntax files.

As the next step, skins could optionally override the value of any ""define"" statement. Example fragment from such an imaginery skin file:

[c.syntax]
  mathoperator=green
  parenthesis=black;white
[php.syntax]
  blah=gray
  etc...

Skins that choose to override some colors would still have to cooperate a little bit with the syntax definition files in order to use the same token type names, but at least they wouldn't have to duplicate the complete syntax file, or the list of the language's keywords again.

A little bit of magic is required wrt the separator character: in skin files it's the semicolon, in syntax files it's whitespace, and I'm afraid colors is not the only thing you can use a ""define"" for. Probably the cleanest is to modify the syntax file parser to accept ';' as an alternative to whitespace. Or, to introduce a new keyword ""color"" which acts similarly to ""define"", but can only be used for colors and attributes, and allow skins to override ""color""s only, not ""define""s. "	defect	new	minor	Future Releases	mc-core	4.7.2			zaytsev gotar@… yuri.v.khan@… Curtis@…			no branch