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JSyntaxPane

JSyntaxPane is a simple to use editorKit that adds syntax highlighting support to a standard JEditorPane. The languages currently supported are C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Groovy, SQL, Python, Ruby, Scala, Bash, XPath, Clojure, Lua, XHTML and XML - full list here

The original project JSyntaxPane can be found on google-code. This is a fork from the 0.9.6 branch with Hanns Holger Rutz's work applied.

The original project is (C)opyright by Ayman Al-Sairafi and released under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

Downloading, building and test running

For building, you need to install Maven.

To build from the command-line, just cd into the checked out folder and issue mvn package. The binary jar will be built in the target folder. It contains a small SyntaxTester main class which you can use to try out the library:

git clone https://github.com/nordfalk/jsyntaxpane
cd jsyntaxpane/jsyntaxpane
mvn package
java -jar target/jsyntaxpane-1.1.5.jar

The JFlex generated sources will be found in target/generated-sources.

Netbeans 6.1+

Choose Tools>Plugins>Available Plugins and choose and install Maven. After installation, just use the IDE's Open Project option to open JSyntaxPane checkedout project (no need to configure dependencies, source directories, Java platform versions etc.)--Maven projects can be directly be opened in Netbeans.

How to use the library

  1. Load the latest release.

  2. You can build from source, or just take the JSyntaxPane.jar from the dist folder. Add it to your classpath.

3a. Create a standard JEditorPane control and use a JSyntaxPane editorKit property as follows:

    jEditorPane.setEditorKit(new JavaSyntaxKit());

3b. You can also just set ContentType to one of the available editorkits.

    DefaultSyntaxKit.initKit();
    jEditorPane.setContentType("text/java")

To change the default colors, modify the SyntaxStyles class.

Customizing

JSyntaxPane uses "Lexers" to distinguish different tokens of any supported languages. Each Lexer must implement the Lexer interface. The Lexers provided were all done using the great JFlex. JFlex takes a lexer definition file, and creates a one class lexer. The Lex files for the languages currently supported are in the the JFlex folder of the zip distribution file.

I will not go into too much details about how to write lex files. the JFLex site has a great manual. But in a nutshell, you can copy a provided lex file, modify it to your needs, then run it through JFlex. Put the generated Java file in the jsyntaxpane package, then build. Make sure you modify the %class line and use the same name for the constructor in the block below.

The TokenTypes class is an enum of all supported TokenTypes. You can also add more types if you need. If you do that, also modify the SyntaxStyle and SyntaxStyles class to use those types.

You also need to modify the SyntaxKit class createDefaultDocument method to use your lexer for the given language. You may also want to modify the install method of SyntaxKit to add other default actions for the component. I'm considering an automated method to make all this automated, without changing the SyntaxKit class.

Once you are done, and built your lexer, you can change the SyntaxTester to test your lexer. Modify the Tester class to use your lexer instead of the built in ones. Whenever the caret is moved, the Token under the caret is displayed in the line below. That makes testing very easy.

If you create Lexers, please consider contributing them.