Re: [Gretl-devel] console syntax coloring
On Sat, 9 Jun 2018, Allin Cottrell wrote:
On Fri, 8 Jun 2018, Sven Schreiber wrote:
> Hi,
>
> shouldn't it be possible (leveraging existing Gtk tools I mean) to get
> syntax-coloring also in the gretl console? Not necessarily before the next
> release, but in principle nowadays that's expected I guess.
A little tricky, since we don't want highlighting applied to the output that
appears in the console. But this should now be OK in git.
Snapshots will follow later.
One limitation: I don't think we can support choice of highlighting styles
(as in the script editor). The thing is you can't just "turn highlighting
off" temporarily, to suppress it you have to insert the text in question with
a set of "tags" that imposes a plain look. That's easy enough with the
default GtkSourceView style: set foreground to black and weight to medium.
But this could fail miserably if the highlighting style had, say, a dark
background.
This is very nice IMO.
While we're at it, let me remind everybody that in the console you also
have some support for tab autocompletion, that makes your life MUCH easier
(especially with very long variable names); the reason why I'm pointing
this out is that I've seen seasoned gretl users who were blissfully
unaware of this feature, so maybe someone on this list may be too.
I imagine that tab autocompletion is sort of second nature for people
(like myself) that use shells a lot, but perhaps hitting the TAB key is
something that doesn't come to mind to those who prefer GUIs.
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Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti
Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali (DiSES)
Università Politecnica delle Marche
(formerly known as Università di Ancona)
r.lucchetti(a)univpm.it
http://www2.econ.univpm.it/servizi/hpp/lucchetti
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