§ tech     # vi • vim • cfengine • highlighting • syntax • sa

A major part of my work these days is connected with cfengine3 and writing promises. I’m kind of a vim-guy, so clearly I’m using it when writing cfengine promises and when you write a lot of code, you’d definitely want to make your development environment comfy and snug. Part of being comfy and sung in my understanding is syntax highlighting, which tremendously simplifies reading the code and makes you spot typos and other sorts of mistakes right away.

There’s an initial version of syntax highlighting for cfeninge, written by Neil Watson available on github. However, I wanted more sophisticated highlighting functionality, so I took Neil’s work and spent couple of weekends extending it. Here are some screenshots with results of that extension:

At the moment, the module highlights correctly cfengine-stdlib.cf and all cf files in examples/ directory of cfengine with exception of knowledge-related promises. There’s still a lot of work to do – a bit of refactoring and then, perhaps, a rudimental syntax checker – but it seems to me already usable, so I decided to release it’s “first” version.

The syntax highlighting module is available at https://github.com/ivanpesin/vim_cf3/tree/master/syntax. To activate it, you’ll need to save cf3.vim in ~/.vim/ directory and add following lines to your ~/.vimrc:

au BufRead,BufNewFile *.cf set ft=cf3
au! Syntax cf3 source $HOME/.vim/cf3.vim