Better syntax highlighting

Better syntax highlighting

[Giuseppe Fuggiano]

Hi there,

I'm learning Emacs for programming tasks and I think it's very powerful.

But, the first thing I saw migrating from Vim is that Emacs handles 
syntax highlighting differently, often messing up if a given source 
contains multiple languages (like a PHP file).  I tried a plugin named 
nxhtml, but it seems heavy and makes Emacs' startup quite slow.  I don't 
want to start an editor war here, just point out that Emacs seems so 
powerful, but doesn't have a smart syntax highlighting available out of 
the box.

I'm sure there's a solution to this. That's why I'm posting.

Regards

-- 
Giuseppe Fuggiano

Re: Better syntax highlighting

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

Giuseppe Fuggiano <giuseppe.fuggiano@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi there,
>
> I'm learning Emacs for programming tasks and I think it's very powerful.
>
> But, the first thing I saw migrating from Vim is that Emacs handles
> syntax highlighting differently, often messing up if a given source
> contains multiple languages (like a PHP file).  I tried a plugin named
> nxhtml, but it seems heavy and makes Emacs' startup quite slow.  I
> don't want to start an editor war here, just point out that Emacs
> seems so powerful, but doesn't have a smart syntax highlighting
> available out of the box.
>
> I'm sure there's a solution to this. That's why I'm posting.

Use mmm-mode.

When it cannot determine it automatically,  you may add tags to
specify the language: 
   {%php-mode%}
    ... 
   {%/php-mode%}


Put: <!-- -*- mode:html;mode: mmm; coding:utf-8 -*- -->
on the first or second line of the file.


-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/

Re: Better syntax highlighting

[Deniz Dogan]

2010/7/22 Giuseppe Fuggiano <giuseppe.fuggiano@gmail.com>:
> Hi there,
>
> I'm learning Emacs for programming tasks and I think it's very powerful.
>
> But, the first thing I saw migrating from Vim is that Emacs handles syntax
> highlighting differently, often messing up if a given source contains
> multiple languages (like a PHP file).  I tried a plugin named nxhtml, but it
> seems heavy and makes Emacs' startup quite slow.  I don't want to start an
> editor war here, just point out that Emacs seems so powerful, but doesn't
> have a smart syntax highlighting available out of the box.
>
> I'm sure there's a solution to this. That's why I'm posting.
>
> Regards
>

I don't think syntax highlighting is what's hard, but rather things
such as indentation of PHP.

-- 
Deniz Dogan

Re: Better syntax highlighting

[Andrea Crotti]

Giuseppe Fuggiano <giuseppe.fuggiano@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi there,
>
> I'm learning Emacs for programming tasks and I think it's very powerful.
>
> But, the first thing I saw migrating from Vim is that Emacs handles
> syntax highlighting differently, often messing up if a given source
> contains multiple languages (like a PHP file).  I tried a plugin named
> nxhtml, but it seems heavy and makes Emacs' startup quite slow.  I
> don't want to start an editor war here, just point out that Emacs
> seems so powerful, but doesn't have a smart syntax highlighting
> available out of the box.
>
> I'm sure there's a solution to this. That's why I'm posting.
>
> Regards

Sure but actually multi-mode syntax highlighting is not an easy thing.
Nxhtml does it pretty well and if you compile it it's pretty fast.

Also consider that I think you can load it only when needed (autoload).

Emacs is probably the editor that can highlights more programming
languages very well (there's really everything).

Emacsers by the way never close emacs (unless they reboot the machine)
so the boot time is not so important after all...

Re: Better syntax highlighting

[Aidan Gauland]

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Giuseppe Fuggiano wrote:
> I'm learning Emacs for programming tasks and I think it's very powerful.
> 
> But, the first thing I saw migrating from Vim is that Emacs handles
> syntax highlighting differently, often messing up if a given source
> contains multiple languages (like a PHP file).  I tried a plugin named
> nxhtml, but it seems heavy and makes Emacs' startup quite slow.  I don't
> want to start an editor war here, just point out that Emacs seems so
> powerful, but doesn't have a smart syntax highlighting available out of
> the box.
> 
> I'm sure there's a solution to this. That's why I'm posting.

I stumbled upon this page...
<http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/MultipleModes>
...but I've never tried anything listed there, because I don't suffer from
multiple-personality disorder. ;)

Hope this helps,
Aidan


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Re: Better syntax highlighting

[Deniz Dogan]

2010/7/22 Aidan Gauland <aidalgol@no8wireless.co.nz>:
> Giuseppe Fuggiano wrote:
>> I'm learning Emacs for programming tasks and I think it's very powerful.
>>
>> But, the first thing I saw migrating from Vim is that Emacs handles
>> syntax highlighting differently, often messing up if a given source
>> contains multiple languages (like a PHP file).  I tried a plugin named
>> nxhtml, but it seems heavy and makes Emacs' startup quite slow.  I don't
>> want to start an editor war here, just point out that Emacs seems so
>> powerful, but doesn't have a smart syntax highlighting available out of
>> the box.
>>
>> I'm sure there's a solution to this. That's why I'm posting.
>
> I stumbled upon this page...
> <http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/MultipleModes>
> ...but I've never tried anything listed there, because I don't suffer from
> multiple-personality disorder. ;)
>

Note that nxhtml actually uses mumamo for a lot of its functionality,
e.g. mako-nxhtml-mumamo-mode, asp-nxhtml-mumamo-mode and
django-nxhtml-mumamo-mode.

-- 
Deniz Dogan

Re: Better syntax highlighting

[Lennart Borgman]

>>> I'm learning Emacs for programming tasks and I think it's very powerful.
>>>
>>> But, the first thing I saw migrating from Vim is that Emacs handles
>>> syntax highlighting differently, often messing up if a given source
>>> contains multiple languages (like a PHP file).  I tried a plugin named
>>> nxhtml, but it seems heavy and makes Emacs' startup quite slow.  I don't

It takes less than a second on a my quite slow machine - if I byte
compile nXhtml. (Otherwise it takes much longer depending on the way
Emacs loads things.)