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?
+2
A:
- RichTextBox syntax highlighting (talks about RichTextBox itself - minimal features but exactly what you asked for here)
- A textbox/richtextbox that has syntax highlighting? [C#] (talks mostly about other ways of doing it)
280Z28
2009-11-08 18:06:59
A:
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).
Winston Smith
2009-11-08 18:07:20
+1
A:
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.
Jan
2009-11-08 18:08:51
A:
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.
nikie
2009-11-08 18:29:28
A:
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.
jdehaan
2009-11-08 19:15:49
Syntax highlighting, for a text renderer designed to call you back or iteratively receive text before rendering, is actually pretty trivial: it's just a lexical analysis that classifies the text according to its token type. But RTF and other rich editors are not designed this way, with separation between model data and its presentation.
Barry Kelly
2009-11-08 19:31:58
Yes, seems that RTF looks quite old nowadays... :-)
jdehaan
2009-11-08 22:20:31
A:
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.
Matt Warren
2009-11-09 23:04:50
If you download the .NET Wrapper from http://scintillanet.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=34393 then you can just add the file ScintillaNet.dll to the "References" of your project (if you are using Visual Studio).
Matt Warren
2009-11-12 09:29:28
requires deploying one of the dlls to windows\system32 which is big downside
Perica Zivkovic
2010-01-19 22:18:25