CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#syntax-highlighting
Mohit Deshpande
Mohit Deshpande

Reputation: 55227

How to Syntax Highlight in a RichTextBox [C#]?

How do I syntax highlight in a richtextbox control AS THE USER TYPES and USING A String[] keywords. I will be publishing a lightweight notepad to the web soon and I want it to have syntax highlighting. I am using Windows forms. Can someone post a code example?

Upvotes: 17

Views: 28705

Answers (6)

Matt Warren
Matt Warren

Reputation: 10291

The Scintilla control is an excellent source code editor that includes syntax highlighting amongst a whole range of other features. You can embed it in your own app and there is a .NET wrapper available.

With Scintilla you can specify the keywords and it will then apply the syntax highlighting as you type.

Upvotes: 5

jdehaan
jdehaan

Reputation: 19928

Syntax highlighting is not an easy task to perform efficiently. Many solutions you can find (like the ones involving modification of RTF) are a one time solution. If you want to highlight and un-highlight words on the fly during edition, your code has to be ready for it. I would not reinvent the wheel and use ICSharp.TextEditor or alike to solve your problem.

Upvotes: 1

Niki
Niki

Reputation: 15867

Not exactly an answer to your question, but have you looked at the text editor component from SharpDevelop? It's quite lightweight (<200kB IIRC), can be easily embedded in WinForms applications and has syntax highlighting for several languages built in.

Otherwise, you might want to look at this CodeProject page. It reformats the RTF while you type, which is not very efficient for large files, and it contains a few creepy catch (Exception) { } blocks, so I'm not sure if I would use it in a life-critical application, but it's definitely a good starting point to see how it can be done.

Upvotes: 1

user169390
user169390

Reputation:

You can change the font of selected words in the richtextbox. Take a look at the Select and SelectedFont properties of the control.

But essentially, you need to iterate through the words, check if a word is present in your keywords, and then change the font, using the above-mentioned properties.

Upvotes: 2

Winston Smith
Winston Smith

Reputation: 21882

Are you using WinForms or WPF?

If WPF, you could have a look at AvalonEdit. It's free and open source, and it's used in SharpDevelop (open source IDE).

Upvotes: 2

Sam Harwell
Sam Harwell

Reputation: 99869

Upvotes: 12

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