visual studio code c++ syntax highlighting

But in the era of extensible editors like Eclipse, we’ve come to expect Syntax highlighting as a minimum for any text editor.

For a long time, this was the feature of IDEs/Editors that came with the language. One thing they were all missing was the Syntax highlighting. (I still remember Brief Editor of the early 90′s made by a company called Underware!) Each had unique capabilities and weaknesses. I myself have used several editors, starting DOS’s EDIT, Unix Vi etc. If you haven’t already tried it, download it from here.Īs developers we tend to expect a lot more from any tool.

What makes it a great tool are it’s easy-to-use user interface, it’s search capabilities (includes Regex out of the box), plugins etc. It also allows you to adapt various encoding in file (ASCII/ANSI, UNICODE etc) and thus you won’t see box characters (well, most of the time). Have you ever tried to open a text file from Unix (or Linux) in Windows’ Notepad? All lines will be collapsed into a big jumble? This won’t happen in Notepad++. With it, you can open almost any text file. It does the same thing Windows’ Notepad does and then some.

This post is about the syntax highlighting in the tool and how you can customize it. I’ve been using it for a while and the more I use, the more I discover about the tool. To give you an example, here's the comment scope as defined by the default dark VSCode theme.I’ve posted about Notepad++ (Npp) tool briefly in a different context. Chances are, your language is going to look good in your theme of choice, and good enough in others. The other is, use the (limited set of) scopes already defined and colorized by VSCode and the theme authors. Not really a good way to go, unless everyone using your language also likes your colour scheme. First one is, extend a theme with your custom scopes and colour them however you want. In that case, there won't be a clear distinction between the tokens you define, even if they are actually defined. If you're writing your own grammar, or converting from TextMate etc., there's a chance you're using different scopes than the ones defined by the theme.

themes, which colorize those scopes in a (hopefully) eye-pleasing way.

language grammars, which turn a text file into tokens with different scopes, and.

Visual studio code c++ syntax highlighting