Context highlighter question

[Crimpson]

so what do the different highlight colors mean? is there somewhere with a more detailed readme? i see all numbers are red, commands like "EXIT" are blue, and so on. But what are these highlights telling me?

[cmorgan]

The best highlighters (most finely tuned) are currently the Crimson Editor ones, and the NotePad++ will overtake them when I can get Mike1072's ideas implemented in a soild way, buut the ConTEXT ediotors are still useful.

 

The keywords are assigned differently based on the number of different keyword categories (colors) allowed by each of the different text programs. They use both IESDP and WeiDU keywords, and they should have comments at the top of each of the keyword categories to tell you what they are (for the crimson editor and context editor - the others I think do not support simple commenting within keywords.)

 

If you are not familiar enough with the ISDP and WeiDU docs, and want to use them as a "shortcut" to finding out how things work, then the best suggestion I can think of is to open several mods in the highlighters and look at what gets highlighted, vesus what does not. As for the actual colors, they are meaningless (and can be altered at whim by the user) - it is what is grouped in the same set of keywords that attempts to be meaningful. In the standard .baf highlighters, for example, I set up green = triggers and red = actions, so that the fomat would be easy to check to see if a SetGlobal() got called as a trigger or vice versa -

 

IF

condition or trigger

THEN RESPONSE #100

do something: action

END

 

 

The easiest way to figure out what is grouped with what in the ConTEXT highlighters is to read the files "weidu_baf.chl", "weidu_dtra.chl", and "weidu_tp2.chl". They have the commands commented, so that for example, in dtra (for reading .d files):

 

// D File WeiDU Main Actions, Stats, States

KeyWords1:

// D File operations and Soundslot ids

KeyWords2:

//DLG start and transition, Triggers

KeyWords3:

// Actions,object script IDS,Variable type, Alignments, Area Type, Attack Styles, Boolean, Damage Type, Enemy/Ally, Gender, gtimes, Journal type, Reaction, Shout, Time, Weather, Slots, General

KeyWords4:

// V/Dialogue files, Tokens, Class, Kit, Spells,

KeyWords5:

 

with colors set as

Keyword1Col: clGreen clWindow B

Keyword2Col: clNavy clWindow B

Keyword3Col: clBlue clWindow B

Keyword4Col: clRed clWindow B

Keyword5Col: clPurple clWindow B

[Crimpson]

First time i looked up Crimson Editor there was something that said "free to try" so i immediately went to context, but now i see Crimson is freeware too... so i'm downloading that now and will give it a try.

it seems it's more popular with this modding community, it's recommended over context?

[cmorgan]

The first I.E. syntax highlighters created were a labor of love by Idobek, and at the time he used ConTEXT. His work helped me, which inspired me to keep his ideas moving forward. I think at that time, just about every one of the big dogs on windows machines used ConTEXT.

 

Nowadays, the field is much more widespread, and there are more freeware or cheap good code editors - Mike1072 uses NotePad++, Miloch uses PSPad, and I have used all of these, including the paid ones (and even though they completely stink, textwrangler is the only thing I have available for mac, so when I have a study hall at work, abnd the ony machine available is a mac, then that is the one I use).

 

I do not know if there really is a community standard. Nowadays, programming in a set of keywords in an xml list is comparatively easy, and anyone who can learn weidu syntax can breeze through most syntax highlighter definition files. So as long as you are working with a code editor instead of a text editor, you are fine; if your particular code editor does not appear on the list, and supports custom syntax highlighting, it is a simple thing to convert the raw lists into the format expected by your editor.

 

Personally, I find Crimson (with its column editing function) very useful, and often will swap sessions between Crimson and NotePad++. Context tends to bog down on older machines when you have multiple files open. On newer ones, it tend not to matter so much.

[the bigg]

Notepad++ here, but I still use ConTEXT for IE files (since highlighters for the IE aren't available, and Notepad++ uses an harder to write but much more powerful highlighting system).

[cmorgan]

dammit - I thought I had set up a release for NotePad++... I will look for it and post it if it isn't.