[Padre-dev] Syntax highlighting

[Gabor Szabo]

On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 8:56 AM, Leandro Hermida
<softdev at leandrohermida.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 1:19 PM, Ahmad Zawawi <ahmad.zawawi at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > > How do I get this to turn on?  I keep selecting PPI in my preferences
>> > > but
>> > > then when I open a file it always shows in the bottom corner
>> > > Scintilla?  I
>> > > am using the latest Padre 0.56
>> >
>> > You're right, I didn't notice this. Looks like a bug.
>> > However the colors themselves did change so I think the highlighter
>> > selection itself did change, only the status line was not updated.
>> >
>>
>> If you change Perl syntax highlighters from Scintilla to PPI
>> highlighters, the status bar will change when you actually start
>> editing the file (i.e. it is bug). I tested this on Win XP. syntax
>> highlighters have also a size limit after which the default scintilla
>> highlighter will always be used for speed considerations. Please take
>> a look at Padre::Document::Perl, the hardcoded limit is 4000
>> characters (which is very low).
>
> Yes this not reasonable.  I don't know how many of you agree, but to me
> top-notch syntax highlighting is such a crucial part of any IDE or text
> editor and the default highlighter should be as least as good and fast as
> for example the one in NEdit.  If pure Perl is too slow to do any of this
> then this could be a huge handicap.  Is it possible to build with XS the
> parts that need to be faster?
>

Hi Leandro,

The situations is that we have several ways to highlight a document
- the Scintilla we use is fast but old and limited
- PPI (we have two versions) is slow but could be improved
- Kate based slow but could be improved

IMHO having superb syntax highlighting for Perl 5 and Perl 6 is critical
for Padre but apparently none of us had the tuits so far to attack the problem.

Actually we have an XS implementation of PPI written by Shmuel Fomberg
that might bring the wanted extra speed to PPI but it is currently stuck due to
lack of tuits. If you have the tuits and would like you should talk to
Steffen Muller,
Adam Kennedy and Shmuel Fomberg where to help:

The last known discussion about this was started here:

http://mail.perlide.org/pipermail/padre-dev/2009-July/001151.html

There is also the experimental PPI highlighter in the code base of
Padre that could be improved a lot. This one requires only Perl.

regards
    Gabor