Way to highlight parts of words permanently? (Find is too limited)

Answered

Created November 06, 2018 17:30

There are times where coding certain libraries becomes a horrifying exercise in visual pattern recognition.

Is there a way to highlight (or otherwise color) certain text matches?

Take the following before and after code for example (removing comments for brevity, and using images because of the limitations of this forum):

This is dramatically easier for me to parse through. Imagine pages upon pages upon pages of this.

I can enocde a macro of some kind to search for it on a keypress, but in that case, I would have to be careful in selecting the "ignore case" and "whole words" thing, because their prior states might not be known from prior searches (they're toggles).

There were a few requests for a sort of "custom syntax highlighter" in the past, but I cannot find that in any current revision.

Any solution come to mind? Or do I need to write my own plugin?

Thanks!

8 comments

Andrey Dernov

Created November 07, 2018 17:02

Check the SDK docs, e.g. this tutorial: http://www.jetbrains.org/intellij/sdk/docs/reference_guide/custom_language_support.html

and the ways to highlight the symbols in editor: http://www.jetbrains.org/intellij/sdk/docs/reference_guide/custom_language_support/syntax_highlighting_and_error_highlighting.html

Konstantin Annikov

Created December 27, 2020 13:10

You may try to use structural search custom inspection for that:

See more here: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/creating-custom-inspections.html

And here: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/search-templates.html#count_filter

Andrey Dernov

Created November 07, 2018 07:07

Have you tried semantic highlighting (Settings/Preferences | Editor | Color Scheme | Language Defaults | Semantic highlighting)?

>There were a few requests for a sort of "custom syntax highlighter" in the past, but I cannot find that in any current revision.

What request do you mean?

Tgm1024

Created November 07, 2018 14:25

At the time, this is the first one I found. There are others, but I'm having trouble locating them right now. They were under various names IIRC: partial identifier coloring, and the like.

https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360000082599-Custom-syntax-highlighting

The existing Semantic Highlighting you pointed out doesn't address my problem. That will assign a different color to each of the parameters or variables. It doesn't allow partial highlighting (or coloring), nor does it keep the same color throughout the file anyway.

It's helpful to visually mask out the insane clutter of long prefixes in identifiers.