Syntax highlighting in packages

[mahrud]

A pretty glaring caveat of syntax highlighting is that it doesn't work for packages. Here's an example with only symbols from Core being highligted, which looks really odd.

A pretty simple solution would be to generate a prism grammar for each package in installPackage and load it in the header of html files from that package.

It would be great if the same worked for emacs.

[mahrud]

There are also a few related suggestions in .https://github.com/Macaulay2/M2/pull/3298.

[pzinn]

(copied from zulip) a tangentially related issue. Say one defines a new function myfunc, then neither in emacs nor in the webapp will the autocompletion work if one types say myf followed by tab. However it does work in the terminal using readline. Why can't we have something similar without readline? it can't be that hard...

[pzinn]

@d-torrance's answer:

I've played around with this a bit. We could potentially do something like call apropos to get a list of possible autocompletions, but output it in such a way that the editor doesn't display the output to the user. This is basically how autocompletion works in the Python Emacs mode

originally I was hoping we could reuse the code made for readline but I guess most of the work is done by readline itself...

[pzinn]

continuing my digression, I'm assuming this is the relevant part of expr.d:

export completions(s:string):array(string) := (
     n := length(s);
     if n == 0 then return array(string)();         -- don't complete the null string
     v := newvarstringarray(6);
     d := globalDictionary;
     while (
      lockRead(d.symboltable.mutex);
      foreach bucket in d.symboltable.buckets do (
           b := bucket;
           while true do when b
           is null do break
           is q:SymbolListCell do (
            t := q.word.name;
            if isalnum(t.0) && n <= length(t) && 0 == strncmp(s,t,n) then append(v,t);
            b = q.next; ));
      unlock(d.symboltable.mutex);
      d != d.outerDictionary) do d = d.outerDictionary;
     extract(v));

[mahrud]

It is not a digression. Syntax highlighting and autocompletion have the same purpose.