[Cuis] Overriding the text styler

[Juan Vuletich]

Hi Phil,

On 6/11/2015 10:11 PM, Phil (list) wrote:
> I've been looking at what it would take to add syntax
> highlighting/coloring for<package I've already spent too much time
> talking about>  and think I have a better understanding of what's
> involved.
>
> Basically, there needs to be a level of indirection added similar in
> concept to compilerClass.  However, since the Squeak doesn't appear to
> have been designed with a modular text styler in mind it's not going to
> be as nice and neat (at least not right away.)  InnerTextMorph appears
> to be where the styling actually occurs and it in turn depends on
> SHTextStylerST80 to do the work which is directly hard-coded in 5 places
> in the image.  At the very least there would need to be a global setting
> that can be overridden which would default to SHTextStylerST80.  This
> could be done via a class method (on Object or somewhere else in the
> hierarchy?) or probably better would be a preference setting that would
> define the default styler.  From there, there would need to be one of
> the following:
>
> 1) A per-text object being styled check to determine what styler to use
> (i.e. in the code browser there would need to be a check of what class
> you're styling for, and for other standalone text morphs you'd need to
> override as needed)
>
> 2) Anyone wanting to customize styling would need to completely take
> over styling everywhere and deal with use cases like mine dynamically in
> their custom styler internally.
>
> While I'll take any accommodations I can get for my needs, I'm thinking
> it would be pretty cool to have more modular styler setup in the various
> code browsers.  In a Smalltalk-only world it would allow you to play
> around with changes to the styler in a safer manner (i.e. if you could
> have it only apply to a specific class hierarchy, your other browser
> windows would continue to work properly while you're writing/debugging
> it).  But it could also be handy if at some point we wanted to support
> something fancy like StyledTextEditor or Markdown for package/class
> comments.  And of course there's my use case where your OMeta/Lisp/DSL
> code could be nicely styled as a first-class citizen just like Smalltalk
> code in the browser... but also in workspaces (i.e. you could have
> multiple DSL-specific, styled workspaces providing live interaction...
> how cool would that be?)
>
> Seems like a nice feature to have... what do you think?  If this is
> agreeable, I'm fine doing the work on the first cut at this.  I just
> need to know how I should handle the top level indirection and whether I
> should be going for an all-or-nothing monolithic approach (i.e. global
> replacement of the styler for everything) or keeping a modular approach
> in mind at the cost of a bit more complexity?
>
> Thanks,
> Phil

I think we should properly support your use case, and the possibility of 
DSL workspaces with specific stylers.

Do you have a working OMeta Styler?

If you have at least a barely working one, we'll work out the proper 
styler selection for each code editor. Please don't work too much on the 
styler selection, Once we have more than one styler, I'd like to 
experiment with this a bit, and I don't want to risk you wasting too 
much effort before we agree on how to do it.

Cheers,
Juan Vuletich