Kate: Alternative (pure) C++14 ready syntax highlighting

Motivation

Since kate developers decided to use my C++/Qt4 syntax as default for C++ highlighting, I (re)started to maintain my “fork” of alternative pure C++ syntax as a separate project. The main reason for that: I want to have pure C++ syntax as default, because most of code I do, do not use Qt framework and I don’t want to see irrelevant highlighting, when use boost::signals2 or POSIX sockets.

Also I have plans to add a separate C++/Qt5 syntax for Qt5 based project (and mark some Qt4 stuff in it as deprecated).

Changes against the “official” syntax

I’ve aready done a bunch of bug fixes and refactorings. Also support for upcoming C++14 features has been added. Partial change log:

  • support for quote digits separator
  • support for user defined literals defined by The Standard for strings, complex numbers and std::chrono constants
  • highlighting for header files #incldue defined by The Standard to make them visually different than ordinal #include, to give a hint that you write it’s name correctly ;)
  • support for user defined literals for floating point numbers (C++11 actually)
  • Aligned Comments now is a separate attribute and by default has the same style as Comment. To reduce a number of attributes it was a Regon Marker, so a lot of users was wondered why some comments (at some positions) was highlighted as a Region Marker.

About Aligned Comments

Most of C++ code I’ve seen (and work with) uses 4 spaces to indent. I always try to align my comments to TAB-stops that aliquot to (my favorite) indent size – i.e. 0, 4, 8, …, 60. But sometimes mass replacements (like sed) may lead to misalign some comments which, sometimes, is not easy to notice. It is why I’ve added that feature to my highlighter – to make properly aligned comments (little) visually different than others.

C++ highlighting example

The 60th position is the last (in my code), where an inline-comment may appear – it is why aligned comments are detected only before this position… To properly align inline-comments I’m using my “Not quite indenter”™ and/or a Pâtè plugins dedicated to C++ progrmmers.

See Also

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