Integrating Scintillua

This page documents how to use Lua-based lexers from Scintillua. SciTECO does not have Scintillua compiled in, but it supports loading external lexer libraries. You can download and extract Scintillua releases, which contain precompiled Windows and Linux 64-bit shared libraries. If there are no precompiled libraries, you can of course manually build Scintillua.

The following macro file for instance, when placed into $SCITECOPATH/lexers/apl.tes, adds APL syntax highlighting via Scintillua:

!* APL (via Scintillua) *!

@^U[lexer.test.apl]{
  :@EN/*.apl/^EQ*/
}

@^U[lexer.set.apl]{
  @ES/SETILEXER/^EQ[$SCITECO_SCINTILLUA]^@apl/$

  :M[color.keyword],(@ES/NAMEOFSTYLE/keyword/)M[color.set]
  :M[color.number],(@ES/NAMEOFSTYLE/number/)M[color.set]
  :M[color.string],(@ES/NAMEOFSTYLE/string/)M[color.set]
  :M[color.operator],(@ES/NAMEOFSTYLE/type/)M[color.set]
  :M[color.variable],(@ES/NAMEOFSTYLE/variable/)M[color.set]
  :M[color.comment],(@ES/NAMEOFSTYLE/comment/)M[color.set]
  :M[color.preproc],(@ES/NAMEOFSTYLE/preprocessor/)M[color.set]
}

You must set the SCITECO_SCINTILLUA environment variable to point to the libscintillua.so shared library (or DLL). The SCITECO_SCINTILLUA_LEXERS environment variable should point to the location of Scintillua’s lexers/ subdirectory. For instance:

export SCITECO_SCINTILLUA_LEXERS=$HOME/scintillua_6.3/lexers
export SCITECO_SCINTILLUA=$SCITECO_SCINTILLUA_LEXERS/libscintillua.so

TODO

• The semantics of SCI_NAMEOFSTYLE had to be tweaked. Instead, it would be better to have a variant of ES that allows returning strings into Q-Registers, so the lexer scripts can build a style-id-to-name map.
• It might be possible to write and possibly ship a generic Scintillua lexer file that makes use of Scintillua’s included filename and hash-bang-line checks to configure all lexers that are supported by Scintillua. This requires:
  • Support of SCI_SETPROPERTIES - we need to be able to pass two strings to Scintilla messages.
  • Support for storing Scintilla message string results into Q-registers. Should automatically use the common idiom of first querying the string length with a NULL pointer. If we had this, we could also undo the SCI_NAMEOFSTYLE workaround above.
• Since the prebuilt Scintillua libraries are in the lexers/ subdirectory, perhaps we should default to the dirname of the library specified via SCI_SETILEXER when setting the scintillua.lexers property. You then wouldn’t necessarily have to set the SCITECO_SCINTILLUA_LEXERS environment variable.

14B	Sep 28 21:20 ../