CODEWITHSUNDEEP
vimvim-syntax-highlighting
Li-yao Xia
Li-yao Xia

Reputation: 33569

Syntax highlighting of nested braces in vim

I am writing a vim syntax file for a yacc-like language, which contains another language in blocks delimited by braces. My problem stems from the inner language also using braces as part of its own syntax. Here's a minimized example:

meta lang {
  lang { meta lang } lang }
meta lang

meta is a keyword of the outer language, and lang is a keyword of the inner language. Those same tokens may also appear in the other language, where they are not keywords.

The highlighting should look like the snippet below, where upper case META and LANG represent highlighted keywords, and lower case words are not highlighted.

META lang {
  LANG { meta LANG } LANG } META lang

My naive attempt below produces this incorrect highlighting (fails to detect the end of the block):

META lang {
  LANG { meta LANG } LANG } meta LANG

My syntax file:

" .vim/syntax/mylang.vim
sy cluster lang contains=langKeyword,langBlock

sy keyword metaKeyword meta
sy keyword langKeyword lang contained

sy region metaBlock start="{" end="}" contains=@lang
sy region langBlock start="{" end="}" contains=@lang contained

hi link metaKeyword Constant
hi link langKeyword Keyword

What am I doing wrong?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 52

Answers (0)

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