Syntax hiliting in xcode

[LongJumper]

Anyway to highlight things other than the list they give you? Like constants, static variables, #define's, functions, member functions, typedefs declared in frameworks?

[NCarter]

Sadly not. This is something I also miss from CodeWarrior when I'm working on Xcode projects. Unfortunately, I'm just having to get used to the idea of minimally highlighted source code. :(

Wonder if there's any way of writing a plugin for Xcode to do this? I doubt it somehow.

[Dan Potter]

Please don't tell me this hasn't improved in the Panther->Tiger transition? :cry:

I actually sent an email to the Whole Tomato guys to ask them if they had any plans to make a Visual Assist type plugin for Xcode, and they said that while they sympathize (and have a number of Mac users there), they didn't have anywhere near the manpower to develop and support something like that. I use V.A. at work on VS.NET, and while it's not perfect, it's pretty awesome.

There's definitely a market for improved highlighting and code completion if it's possible to add it. I'd buy it.

[NCarter]

Please don't tell me this hasn't improved in the Panther->Tiger transition?
'fraid so. I'm running Tiger and it's just as basic as before.

Interesteringly, Xcode does seem to already have the infrastructure to do intelligent syntax highlighting. For example, the Class Browser knows about all the classes in your project, and autocompletion and symbol lookup use the same index information to provide useful features. It's not such a big step to integrate this with the editor's syntax highlighting.

Maybe logging feature requests with Apple might help.

[Dan Potter]

Does anyone know if it's even possible to write add-on plugins for Xcode to do stuff like this? 'Cause if so I might be willing to give it a shot. I'd sure love to get some better syntax highlighting myself.

For now I'll just go in the corner and (hypocritically) sulk about proprietary software ;)

[jspoon]

I personally like SubEthaEdit's default objective-c highlighting scheme- I don't think it dynamically finds classes but it does a lot more than Xcode. Also, the default colors are a lot more easily distinguishable. Too bad my machine is pathetic and turning on syntax highlighting on a largish document slows everything down to a crawl.

[Dan Potter]

Just found this today, you guys might find it interesting.

http://www.obdev.at/products/completion-dictionary/index.html

It's about completion rather than highlighting, but still may be useful, and proves that it's possible to hook into some parts of Xcode for extensions anyway :)