A text editor supporting DIFFERENT fonts according to syntax highlighting rules

Aquarius_Girl · 04-04-2011, 06:41 AM

KWrite supports syntax highlighting but I can't change the font of according to syntax highlighting rules. There is one font for the whole file.

Same is the problem with QtCreator too.

and I am aware of this site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_text_editors

But installing and then testing every editor is a painful job.

Is someone aware of a text editor supporting Linux and satisfying my query?

corp769 · 04-04-2011, 06:56 AM

Hey, have you ever tried out abiword?
http://www.abisource.com/

Josh

Edit - The link was of course for reference. It is definitely in your package manager and all that good stuff!

Aquarius_Girl · 04-04-2011, 06:59 AM

Do you mean to say that Abiword supports syntax highlighting? I checked the FAQ.

corp769 · 04-04-2011, 07:06 AM

I could of sworn I just used syntax highlighting in abiword not too long ago... Let me check...

Aquarius_Girl · 04-04-2011, 07:16 AM

HELLO.........There is a BUG in Abiword 2.6.8, when I click the "Edit" -> "Preferences", the Abiword crashes and I tried this 10 times just now

Any menu item I select and it just crashes.

corp769 · 04-04-2011, 07:26 AM

Well I can confirm that it is not abiword, so I am sorry about that. But I am still looking though, since now I am wondering what the hell I used...

Aquarius_Girl · 04-04-2011, 07:31 AM

There is an extension in oowriter: http://extensions.services.openoffic.../download/3543

But it just crashes the writer while installation!

Guttorm · 04-04-2011, 07:33 AM

Hi

I don't understand. A text file has no concept of fonts. If you select a paragraph and change the font, how is it supposed to store that in the text file?

SigTerm · 04-04-2011, 07:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Anisha Kaul

KWrite supports syntax highlighting but I can't change the font of a particular paragraph. There is one font for the whole file.

Plain text doesn't support "font for paragraph" - this is an office suite(open office)/html/rtf editor feature.
The best you might be able to get is text editor that uses different fonts according to syntax highlighting rules.

Aquarius_Girl · 04-04-2011, 09:02 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by SigTerm

Plain text doesn't support "font for paragraph" - this is an office suite(open office)/html/rtf editor feature.
The best you might be able to get is text editor that uses different fonts according to syntax highlighting rules.

Thanks for clarifying my misconception about text editors.
Actually I want a text editor which supports different fonts for different types of syntaxes. Like a different font for comments and data types. I have started writing the notes on laptop instead of paper, so it contains code too and documentation too. I'll change the title.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Guttorm

I don't understand. A text file has no concept of fonts. If you select a paragraph and change the font, how is it supposed to store that in the text file?

Thanks to you too, I couldn't understand what you were saying, but SigTerm explained it better.

MTK358 · 04-04-2011, 09:55 AM

I don't understand, did you think text editors allow you to edit fonts like a work processor or did SigTerm misunderstand you?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Anisha Kaul

Thanks for clarifying my misconception about text editors.
Actually I want a text editor which supports different fonts for different types of syntaxes. Like a different font for comments and data types. I have started writing the notes on laptop instead of paper, so it contains code too and documentation too. I'll change the title.

Isn't bold and italic enough? Most editors support that.

I guess that the reason many editors might not have that feature is that if it were implemented, you cannot easily just change your font. You would have to change all the syntax rules in all the languages.

Aquarius_Girl · 04-04-2011, 10:37 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MTK358

Isn't bold and italic enough? Most editors support that.

If bold and italic were enough, I wouldn't have created this thread.

SigTerm · 04-04-2011, 10:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Anisha Kaul

Actually I want a text editor which supports different fonts for different types of syntaxes. Like a different font for comments and data types.

Umm... it is possible to make this if syntaxes you need can be explained as regexps(i.e. if it can be explained as a set of syntax highlighting rules).

I do not remember any text editor that can do something like that - normally they're all limited to single font.
You can write one, of course (Qt 4 has QPlainTextEditor class that allows setting text attributes (color/font) for individual characters, and there's syntax highlighter example), but (although it isn't that difficult) that'll take at least few days.

IMO, you have following options:

Switch to office suite, html editor or rtf editor.
Keep searching. Project like that might exist, although I've never heard about it.
Grab existing (opensource) editor that can display bold/non-bold font within same file and fork it to support multiple fonts (bold and non-bold font are two different fonts, so if same editor can display both bold and non-bold fonts at once, it can be probably tweaked to support several different fonts).
Write editor from scratch using a gui toolkit (Qt 4).

MTK358 · 04-04-2011, 11:25 AM

It would be easy to do when writing an editor from scratch, just add a font option (apart from the usual color, bold, and italic options) for every syntax rule.

SigTerm · 04-04-2011, 11:54 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MTK358

It would be easy to do when writing an editor from scratch,

That depends on GUI toolkit.