TEXTMATE SYNTAX PARSING AND VISUAL STUDIO LOOK AND FEEL

In AlterNET Studio version 9, our parsing engine has been upgraded to support TextMate grammar, which powers syntax highlighting and advanced text editing features of Visual Studio Code.

TextMate parser utilizes the TextMateSharp package, a C# port of microsoft/vscode-textmate project, which relies on Oniguruma regex engine and includes grammar definitions for 40+ programming languages.

Besides the definition files, each grammar contains language specifications with indentation rules, folding regions, matching braces, and auto-closing braces. We have implemented a subset of this specification as well as some additional features available in Visual Studio Code:

Indent-based outlining

The TextMate parser now supports indentation-based folding and structure guidelines. Some language definitions contain indentation rules that affect the indentation level, such as { and } characters in .css files. Otherwise, we calculate indentation based on the amount of whitespace at the beginning of every text line.

Code suggestions

Like in Visual Studio, we provide suggestions when a user types Ctrl + Space. These suggestions are not based on understanding the semantics of the language; the suggestion list shows all the symbols already found in the text.

Visual Studio Color and look and feel.

We now support the Visual Studio code theme and descendant TextMate color theme, which provides the distinct appearance of outlining sections, guidelines, folded sections, and the current line. It supports dark, light, and all other VS Code color themes.

MiniMap

A Minimap gives you a high-level overview of your source code, useful for quick navigation and code understanding. A file's minimap is shown on the right side of the editor. You can click the shaded area to quickly jump to different text document sections.

In subsequent releases, we will implement other language specification features, such as braces auto-completion and auto-indentation.