The mathematica.SE is currently in private beta and will open to the public in a few days. Stack Overflow and related sites use prettify.js, however Mathematica is not a supported language. It would be pretty awesome to have a custom highlighting script for our site, and I request the JavaScript and CSS community's help in developing a such a script and the accompanying CSS.
I've listed below a few basic requirements such that it captures most of the features of Mathematica's default highlighting scheme (ignoring stuff that only the internal parser would know). I've also named the colours generically – hexadecimal colour codes can be picked from the screenshots I've provided (further below). I've also added code samples to accompany the screenshots so that folks can test it out.
Basic requirements
Comments
These are entered as (* comment *). So anything between these should be highlighted in gray.
Strings
These are entered as "string"(single quotes are not supported), and should be highlighted in pink.
Operators/short hand notations
Apart from the standard +, -, *, /, ^, ==, etc., Mathematica has several other operators and short hand notations. The most commonly encountered ones are:
#, ##, ###, /#, //#, //, ~, /., //., ->, :>, /:, /;, :=, :^=, =.,
&, |, ||, &&, _, __, ___, ;;, [[, ]], <<, >>, ~~, <>
These, and parenthesis, brackets and braces should all be highlighted in black.
Patterns objects and slots
Pattern objects start with a letter and have either _ or __ or ___ attached, like for example, x_, x__ and x___. These can also have additional letters following the underscore, as x_abc, etc. All of these should be highlighted in green.
Slots are # and ## and can also be followed by an integer as #1, ##4, etc., and should also be in green.
Both of these (pattern objects and slots) are usually terminated by an operator/bracket/shortform from point 3 above.
Functions/variables
Functions and variables is a rather loose terminology here, but serves for the purposes of this post. Anything not falling in the above 4 can be highlighted in black. Mathematica often uses backticks ` in code and should be considered part of the function/variable name. E.g., abcd`defg. Dollar signs $ anywhere in a variable name is to be treated just like a letter (i.e., nothing special).
For all of the above, if they appear inside strings, they should be treated as such, i.e. "#~# should be highlighted in pink.
Additional nice to haves:
In the pattern objects in point 3 above, if the underscore(s) is followed by a ? and then some letters, then the part following the _ should be in black. E.g., in x__?abc, the x__ part must be in green and the ?abc in black.
if a function/variable starts with a capital letter, then it is highlighted in black. If it starts with a small letter, it is highlighted in blue. Internally, this differentiates built-in functions vs. user defined functions. However, the mathematica community (pretty much everywhere) sticks to this naming convention fairly well, so distinguishing the two would serve some purpose.
Screenshots & code samples:
1. Simple examples
Here's a small example set, with a screenshot at the end showing how it looks in Mathematica:
(*simple pattern objects & operators*)
f[x_, y__] := x Times ## y
(*pattern objects with chars at the end and strings*)
f[x_String] := x <> "hello#world"
(*pattern objects with ?xxx at the end*)
f[x_?MatrixQ] := x + Transpose#x
<< Combinatorica` (*example with backticks and inline comment*)
(*Slightly more complicated example with a mix of stuff*)
Developer`PartitionMap[Total, Range#1000, 3][[3 ;; -3]]~Partition~2 //
Times ### # &
2. A real world example
Here's an example from this answer of mine that also indicates my point 2 in the "Additional nice to haves" section, i.e., lowercase stuff being highlighted in blue.
Also, you might notice some of the variables highlighted in orange – I purposefully didn't include that as a requirement, as I think that's going to be a lot harder to do without a parser that knows Mathematica.
prob = MapIndexed[#1/#2 &,
Accumulate[
EuclideanDistance[{0, 0}, #] < 1 & /# arrows // Boole]]~N~4;
Manipulate[
Graphics[{White, Rectangle[{-5, -5}, {5, 5}], Red, Disk[{0, 0}, 1],
Black, Point[arrows[[;; i]]],
Text[Style[First#prob[[i]], Bold, 18, "Helvetica"], {-4.5, 4.5}]},
ImageSize -> 200], {i, Range[2, 20000, 1]},
ControlType -> Manipulator, SaveDefinitions -> True]
Is this feasible? Too much? Too hard? Impossible?
Quite frankly, I don't know the answer to any of those. I just listed some basic features that everyone on mathematica.SE would love to have and some additional stuff that would be a cherry on the top. However, do let me know if these are too difficult to implement. We can work out a smaller subset of features.
In recognition of this help, you all have the Mathematica community's eternal gratitude and in addition, I'll award a 500 bounty to each person that contributes significantly to this (if it's done in parts by different folks) – I'll rely on your votes/comments/output on the answers to decide what's significant (perhaps more than one bounty to one person if they do all the work). Implementing the "Additional nice to haves" gets an automatic +500 regardless of previous bounties, so you can also build upon the work of others even if you don't do the first half. I might also periodically place smaller bounties to attract users who might not have seen this question, so if you happen to earn those bounties, they'll be in addition to the "bounty to reward an existing answer" which will be decided towards the end.
Lastly, I'm not in a hurry. So please take your time with this question. The bounty is always an option until it is implemented by SE (or if it has been determined that existing answers satisfy the requirements completely). Ideally, I'm hoping to get this implemented 2/3rs of our way into the beta, which is 2 months from now.
Preface
Since the Mathematica support for google-code-prettify was mainly developed for the new Mathematica.Stackexchange site, please see also the discussion here.
Introduction
I have no deep knowledge of all of this, but there were times when I wrote a cweb plugin for Idea to have my code highlighted there. In an IDE all this is not a one step process. It is divided into several steps and each step has more highlighting-abilities. Let me explain this a bit to give later some reasons why some things are (imho) not possible for a code-highlighter we need here.
At first the code is split into tokens which are the single parts of a programming language. After this lexer you can categorize intervals of your code into e.g. whitespace, literal, string, comment, and so on. This lexer eats the source-code by testing regular expressions, storing the token-type for a text-span and stepping forward in the code.
After this lexical scan the source-code can be parsed by using the rules of the programming language, the tokens and the underlying code. For instance, if we have a token Plus which is of type Keyword then we know that the brackets and the parameter should follow. If not, the syntax is not correct. What you can build with this parsing is called an AST, abstract syntax tree, and looks basically like the TreeForm of Mathematica syntax.
With a nicely designed language, like Java for instance, it is possible to the check the code while typing and make it almost impossible to write syntactically wrong code.
prettify.js and Mathematica Code
First, the prettify.js implements only a lexical scanner, but no parser. I'm pretty sure, that this would be impossible anyway regarding the time-constrains for displaying a web-page. So let me explain what features are not possible/feasible with prettify.js:
Also, you might notice some of the variables highlighted in orange – I
purposefully didn't include that as a requirement, as I think that's
going to be a lot harder to do without a parser that knows
Mathematica.
Right, because the highlighting of these variables depends on the context. You have to know, that you are inside a Table construct or something like that.
Hacking prettify.js
I think hacking an extension for prettify.js is not so hard. I'm an absolute regular expression noob, so be prepared of what follows.
We don't need so much stuff for a simple Mathematica lexer.
We have whitespace, comments, string-literals, braces, a lot of operators, usual literals like variables and a giant list of keywords.
Lets start, with the keywords in java-script regexp-form:
Export["google-code-prettify/keywordsmma.txt",
StringJoin ## Riffle[Apply[StringJoin,
Partition[Riffle[Names[RegularExpression["[A-Z].*"]],
"|"], 100], {1}], "'+ \n '"], "TEXT"]
The regular expression for whitespace and string-literals can be copied from another language. Comments are matched by something like
/^\(\*[\s\S]*?\*\)/
This runs wrong if we have comments inside comments, but for the moment I don't care. We have braces and brackets
/^(?:\[|\]|{|}|\(|\))/
We have something like blub_boing which should be matched separately.
/^[a-zA-Z$]+[a-zA-Z0-9$]*_+([a-zA-Z$]+[a-zA-Z0-9$]*)*/
We have the slots #, ##, #1, ##9 (currently only one digit can follow)
/^#+[0-9]?/
We have variable names and other literals. They need to start with either a letter or $ and then can follow letters, numbers and $. Currently \[Gamma] is not matched as one literal but for the moment it's ok.
/^[a-zA-Z$]+[a-zA-Z0-9$]*/
And we have operators (I'm not sure this list is complete).
/^(?:\+|\-|\*|\/|,|;|\.|:|#|~|=|\>|\<|&|\||_|`|\^)/
Update
I cleaned the stuff a bit up, did some debugging and created a color-style which looks beautiful to me. The following stuff works as far as I can see correctly:
All system symbols which can be found through Names[RegularExpression["[A-Z].*"]] are matched and highlighted in blue
Braces and brackets are black but bold font-weight. This was an suggestion from Szabolcs and I like it very much since it definitely add some energy to the appearance of the code
Patterns, as they appear in function definitions and the slots of pure functions are highlighted in green. This was suggested by Yoda and goes along with the highlighter in the Mathematica frontend. Patterns are only green in combination with a variable like in blub__Integer, a1_ or in b34_Integer32. Testfunctions for the pattern like in num_?NumericQ are only green infront of the question mark.
Comments and Strings have the same color. Comments and strings can go over several lines. Strings can include backslashed quotes. Comments cannot be nested.
For the coloring I used consistently the ColorData[1] scheme to ensure colors look nice side by side.
Currently it looks like that:
Testing and debugging
Szabolcs asked whether and how it is possible to test this. This is easy: You need my google-code-prettify source (Where can I put this, so that everyone has access?). Unpack the sources and open the file tests/mathematica_test.html in a webbrowser. This file loads by itself the files src/prettify.js, src/lang-mma.js and src/prettify-mma-1.css.
in lang-mma.js you find the regular expression the lexer is using when splitting the code into tokens.
in prettify-mma-1.css you find the style definitions I use
To test your own code, simply open mathematica_test.html in an editor and paste your stuff between the pre tags. Reload the page and your code should appear.
Debugging: If the highlighter is not working correctly, you can debug with an IDE or with Google-Chrome. In Chrome you mark the word where the highlighter starts to fail and make right-klick and Inspect Element. What you see then is the underlying html-highlight code. There you can see every single token and you see which type the token is. This looks then like
<span class="tag">[</span>
You see the open bracket is of type tag. This matches with the regexp definition I made in lang-mma.js. In Chrome it is even possible to browse the JS code, set breakpoints and debug it while reloading your page.
Local installation for Google Chrome and Firefox
Tim Stone was so kind to write a script which injects the highlighter during the loading of sites under http://stackoverflow.com/questions/. As soon as google-code-prettify is turned on for mathematica.stackexchange.com it should work there too.
I adapted this script to use my lexical scanning rules and colors. I heard that in Firefox the script is not always working, but this is how to install it:
Chrome: Follow this link https://github.com/halirutan/Mathematica-Source-Highlighting/raw/master/mathematica-source-highlighter.user.js and you should be prompted whether you want to install this extension.
Firefox: ensure you have the Greasemonkey plugin installed. Then download the same link as for Chrome.
Now you are set up and when you reload this page, comments, kernel-functions, strings and patterns should be highlighted correctly.
Versions
Under https://github.com/halirutan/Mathematica-Source-Highlighting/raw/master/mathematica-source-highlighter.user.js you will always find the most recent version. Here is some change history.
- 02/23/2013 Updated the lists of symbols and keywords to Mathematica version 9.0.1
- 09/02/2012 some minor issues with the coloring of Mathematica-patterns were fixed. For a detailed overview of features with Pattern-operator : see also the discussion here
02/02/2012 support of many number input formats like .123`10.2 or 1.2`100.3*^-12, highlighting of In[23] and Out[4], ::usage or other messages like blub::boing, highlighting of patterns like ProblemTest[prob:(findp_[pfun_, pvars_, {popts___}, ___]), opts___], bug-fixes (I checked the parser against 3500 lines of package code from the AddOns directory. It took about 3-4 sec to run, which should be more than fast enough for our purposes.)
01/30/2012 Fixed missing '?' in the operator list. Included named-characters like \\[Gamma] to give a complete match for such symbols. Added $variables in the keyword list. Improved the matching of patterns. Added matching of context constructions like Developer`PackedArrayQ. Switch of the color-scheme due to many requests. Now it's like in the Mathematica-frontend. Keywords black, variables blue.
01/29/2012 Tim hacked to injecting code. Now the highlighting works on mathematica.stackexchange too.
01/25/2012 Added the recognition of Mathematica-numbers. This should now highlight things like {1, 1.0, 1., .12, 16^^1.34f, ...}. Additionally it should recognize the backtick behind a number. I switched comments and strings to gray and use a dark red for the numbers.
01/23/2012 Initial version. Capabilities are described under section Update.
Not exactly what you are asking for, but I created a similar extension for MATLAB (based on the excellent work already done here). The project is hosted on github.
The script should solve some of the issues common for MATLAB code on Stack Overflow:
comments (no need to use tricks like %# ..)
transpose operator (single quote) is correctly recognized as such (confused with quoted strings by the default prettifier)
highlighting of popular built-in functions
Keep in mind the syntax highlighting is not perfect; among other things, it fails on nested block comments (I can live with that for now). As always, comments/fixes/issues are welcome.
A separate userscript is included, it allows switching the language used as seen in the screenshot below:
--- before ---
--- after ---
For those interested, a third userscript is provided, adapted to work on "MATLAB Answers" website.
TL;DR
Install the userscript for SO directly from:
https://github.com/amroamroamro/prettify-matlab/raw/master/js/prettify-matlab.user.js
I have started the painful first steps of using emacs to edit an HTML file with both HTML tags and javascript content. I have installed nxhtml and tried using it - i.e set up to use nxhtml-mumamo-mode for .html files. But I am not loving it. When I am editing the Javascript portion of the code the tab indents do not behave as they do when editing C/C++ code. It starts putting tabs within the line and if you try and hit tab in the white space preceding a line it inserts the tab rather than re-tabifying the line.
Another aspect that I don't like is that it doesn't do syntax colouring like the usual C/C++ modes do. I much prefer the behaviour of the default java-mode when editing HTML files but that doesn't play nicely with the HTML code. :-(
1) Is there a better mode for editing HTML files with Javascript portions?
2) Is there a way to get nxhtml to use the default java-mode for the javascript portions?
Regards,
M
Another solution is multi-web-mode:
https://github.com/fgallina/multi-web-mode
which may be more easily configurable than the already mentioned multi-mode.
You just configure your preferred modes in your .emacs file like this:
(require 'multi-web-mode)
(setq mweb-default-major-mode 'html-mode)
(setq mweb-tags
'((php-mode "<\\?php\\|<\\? \\|<\\?=" "\\?>")
(js-mode "<script[^>]*>" "</script>")
(css-mode "<style[^>]*>" "</style>")))
(setq mweb-filename-extensions '("php" "htm" "html" "ctp" "phtml" "php4" "php5"))
(multi-web-global-mode 1)
More on Emacs's multiple multiple modes (sigh) here:
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MultipleModes
UPDATE: simplified the regexps to detect JavaScript or CSS areas to make them work with HTML5 -- no need for super-precise and fragile regular expressions.
I have written the major mode web-mode.el for this kind of usage : editing HTML templates that embed JS, CSS, Java (JSP), PHP. You can download it on http://web-mode.org
Web-mode.el does syntax highlighting and indentation according to the type of the block.
Installation is simple :
(require 'web-mode)
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.html$" . web-mode))
Great question. Look how many upvotes you got on your first one!
Everyone has the same experience as you. Me too.
Rather than rely on nhtml-mode which exhibited the same sort of strangeness for me as you described, I looked for another option and found multi-mode.el . It's a sort of general-purpose multi-mode skeleton. To use it, you need to specify regular expressions to describe where one mode starts and another one ends. So, you look for <script...> to start a javascript block, and <style...> to start a css block. Then you plug in your own modes for each block - if you like espresso for javascript, use it. And so on for the other regexes that identify other blocks.
In practice, as you navigate through the document, a different mode is enabled for each block.
I used multi-mode to produce an ASP.NET, that allows me to edit C#, HTML, CSS, and Javascript in a single file, with the proper highlighting and fontification depending on where the cursor is in the buffer. It isn't perfect but I found it to be a marked improvement on the existing possibilities. In fact this may be what you want. Try it out.
https://code.google.com/p/csharpmode/source/browse/trunk/aspx-mode.el?r=14
Not really a good solution but a quick fix if you really need to have javascript in your html is to select the region containing javascript and use the command narrow-to-region(C-x n n) and then switch to your preferred javascript mode. The command widen brings you back, (C-x n w).
It sounds like you've setup your nxhtml incorrectly. The only setup necessary should be loading the autostart.el file, and then everything should work to some level. nxhtml isn't perfect in any way, but my experiences from using it for html/css/javascript/mako is pretty good, at least for everything but mako. But I'm pretty sure I've screwed up with the mako-part.
This is how I initialize my nxhtml:
(when (load "autostart.el" t)
(setq nxhtml-skip-welcome t
mumamo-chunk-coloring 'submode-colored
indent-region-mode t
rng-nxml-auto-validate-flag nil))
Vim 7.0.237 is driving me nuts with indentexpr=HtmlIndentGet(v:lnum). When I edit JavaScript in a <script> tag indented to match the surrounding html and press enter, it moves the previous line to column 0. When I autoindent the whole file the script moves back to the right.
Where is vim's non-annoying JavaScript-in-HTML/XHTML indent?
Here is similar question with accepted answer with links to two vim plugins:
html improved indentation : A better indentation for HTML and embedded javascript mentioned by Manni.
OOP javascript indentation : This indentation script for OOP javascript (especially for EXTJS) .
One of them solved my problems with JavaScript scripts indention problems.
Have you tried this plugin?
I recommend installing vim-javascript.
It is an up-to-date plugin that properly indents javascript, including more recent developments like the syntax used in closures such as with jQuery.
Personally I toggle between :set ai and :set noai, but might be too tedious for you.
I have plugins for indenting HTML and JavaScript files. To indent JavaScript inside HTML, I temporarily change the file type, select and indent the lines, and then change the file type back.
:filetype javascript
(select lines)
=
:filetype html
It's a little tedious, but it always produces the results I expect.
Has anyone else found VIM's syntax highlighting of Javascript sub-optimal? I'm finding that sometimes I need to scroll around in order to get the syntax highlighting adjusted, as sometimes it mysteriously drops all highlighting.
Are there any work-arounds or ways to fix this? I'm using vim 7.1.
You might like to try this improved Javascript syntax highlighter rather than the one that ships with VIMRUNTIME.
Well, I've modified Yi Zhao's Javascript Syntax, and added Ajax Keywords support, also highlight DOM Methods and others.
Here it is, it is far from being perfect as I'm still new to Vim, but so far it has work for me. My Javascript Syntax. If you can fix, add features, please do.
UPDATE: I forgot these syntax highlights are only shown if you included them in your own colorscheme, as I did in my Nazca colorscheme. I'll test if I could add these line into my modified syntax file.
Follow the new version of the javascript syntax file in github, for it is no longer required to modify your current colorscheme.
Syntax coloring synchronization probably needs adjustment. I've found in certain contexts that I need to change it.
Syntax synchronization (":help syn-sync") controls how vim keeps track of and refreshes its parse of the code for coloring, so that it can start drawing anywhere in the file.
The defaults don't always work for me, so sometimes I find myself issuing
:syn sync fromstart
I suggest reading through the documentation under
:help syn-sync
or just check
:help syntax
and find the section on synchronization.
to make an informed decision among the four available basic options.
I maintain mappings to function keys to switch between "fromstart" and "ccomment" modes and for just clearing the sync settings.
This is a really old post, but I was experiencing the same thing: sometimes syntax highlight would just stop working when looking at the javascript section in an .html file. As the OP mentions, a quick workaround was to scroll up and then magically things would start highlighting again.
Today I found the underlying problem and a good solution. In Vim, syntax highlighting uses a context to derive the correct highlight, where context is defined by the previous lines. It is possible to specify how many lines before the current line are used by issuing :syntax sync minlines=200. In this case, it will use up to 200 previous lines as context. It is possible to use the whole file (which can be slow for long files) by running :syntax sync fromstart.
Once I found that, I added this line to my .vimrc:
autocmd BufEnter *.html :syntax sync fromstart
By doing so, .html files will use the whole file as context. Thus, the javascript section will always by highlighted properly, regardless of how long the JS section is. Hope this helps someone else out there!
For a quick and dirty fix, sometimes I just scroll up and down and the highlighting readjusts. Ctrl+L for a screen redraw can also fix it.