3 This help page aims to cover two aspects of micro's syntax highlighting engine:
5 - How to create colorschemes and use them
6 - How to create syntax files to add to the list of languages micro can highlight
11 To change your colorscheme, press Ctrl-E in micro to bring up the command
14 set colorscheme solarized
16 (or whichever colorscheme you choose).
18 Micro comes with a number of colorschemes by default. Here is the list:
22 These should work and look nice in most terminals. I recommend these
25 * `monokai`: this is the monokai colorscheme; you may recognize it as Sublime
26 Text's default colorscheme. It requires true color to look perfect, but the
27 256 color approximation looks very good as well. It's also the default
34 * `bubblegum`: a light colorscheme
38 These may vary widely based on the 16 colors selected for your terminal.
40 * `simple`: this is the simplest colorscheme. It uses 16 colors which are set by
42 * `solarized`: You should have the solarized color palette in your terminal to use this colorscheme properly.
44 * `cmc-paper`: cmc-16, but on a white background. (Actually light grey
45 on most ANSI (16-color) terminals)
46 * `geany`: Colorscheme based on geany's default highlighting.
50 These require terminals that support true color and require `MICRO_TRUECOLOR=1` (this is an environment variable).
52 * `solarized-tc`: this is the solarized colorscheme for true color.
53 * `atom-dark-tc`: this colorscheme is based off of Atom's "dark" colorscheme.
54 * `cmc-tc`: A true colour variant of the cmc theme. It requires true color to
55 look its best. Use cmc-16 if your terminal doesn't support true color.
56 * `gruvbox-tc`: The true color version of the gruvbox colorscheme
57 * `github-tc`: The true color version of the Github colorscheme
61 You can also use `monochrome` if you'd prefer to have just the terminal's default
62 foreground and background colors. Note: This provides no syntax highlighting!
66 See `help gimmickcolors` for a list of some true colour themes that are more
67 just for fun than for serious use. (Though feel free if you want!)
70 ## Creating a Colorscheme
72 Micro's colorschemes are also extremely simple to create. The default ones can
74 [here](https://github.com/zyedidia/micro/tree/master/runtime/colorschemes).
76 They are only about 18-30 lines in total.
78 Basically to create the colorscheme you need to link highlight groups with
79 actual colors. This is done using the `color-link` command.
81 For example, to highlight all comments in green, you would use the command:
84 color-link comment "green"
87 Background colors can also be specified with a comma:
90 color-link comment "green,blue"
93 This will give the comments a blue background.
95 If you would like no foreground you can just use a comma with nothing in front:
98 color-link comment ",blue"
101 You can also put bold, or underline in front of the color:
104 color-link comment "bold red"
109 There are three different ways to specify the color.
111 Color terminals usually have 16 colors that are preset by the user. This means
112 that you cannot depend on those colors always being the same. You can use those
113 colors with the names `black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, white`
114 and the bright variants of each one (brightblack, brightred...).
116 Then you can use the terminals 256 colors by using their numbers 1-256 (numbers
117 1-16 will refer to the named colors).
119 If the user's terminal supports true color, then you can also specify colors
120 exactly using their hex codes. If the terminal is not true color but micro is
121 told to use a true color colorscheme it will attempt to map the colors to the
122 available 256 colors.
124 Generally colorschemes which require true color terminals to look good are
125 marked with a `-tc` suffix and colorschemes which supply a white background are
126 marked with a `-paper` suffix.
130 Here is a list of the colorscheme groups that you can use:
132 * default (color of the background and foreground for unhighlighted text)
144 * statusline (Color of the statusline)
145 * tabbar (Color of the tabbar that lists open files)
146 * indent-char (Color of the character which indicates tabs if the option is
152 * current-line-number
155 * divider (Color of the divider between vertical splits)
157 Colorschemes must be placed in the `~/.config/micro/colorschemes` directory to
162 In addition to the main colorscheme groups, there are subgroups that you can
163 specify by adding `.subgroup` to the group. If you're creating your own custom
164 syntax files, you can make use of your own subgroups.
166 If micro can't match the subgroup, it'll default to the root group, so it's
167 safe and recommended to use subgroups in your custom syntax files.
169 For example if `constant.string` is found in your colorscheme, micro will us
170 that for highlighting strings. If it's not found, it will use constant instead.
171 Micro tries to match the largest set of groups it can find in the colorscheme
172 definitions, so if, for examle `constant.bool.true` is found then micro will use
173 that. If `constant.bool.true` is not found but `constant.bool` is found micro
174 will use `constant.bool`. If not, it uses `constant`.
176 Here's a list of subgroups used in micro's built-in syntax files.
178 * comment.bright (Some filetypes have distinctions between types of comments)
181 * constant.bool.false
183 * constant.specialChar
185 * constant.string.url
186 * identifier.class (Also used for functions)
189 * preproc.shebang (The #! at the beginning of a file that tells the os what
190 script interpreter to use)
191 * symbol.brackets (`{}()[]` and sometimes `<>`)
192 * symbol.operator (Color operator symbols differently)
193 * symbol.tag (For html tags, among other things)
194 * type.keyword (If you want a special highlight for keywords like `private`)
196 In the future, plugins may also be able to use color groups for styling.
201 The syntax files is written in yaml-format and specify how to highlight
204 Micro's builtin syntax highlighting tries very hard to be sane, sensible and
205 provide ample coverage of the meaningful elements of a language. Micro has
206 syntax files built in for over 100 languages now! However, there may be
207 situations where you find Micro's highlighting to be insufficient or not to your
208 liking. The good news is that you can create your own syntax files, and place them
209 in `~/.config/micro/syntax` and Micro will use those instead.
211 ### Filetype definition
213 You must start the syntax file by declaring the filetype:
219 #### Detect definition
221 Then you must provide information about how to detect the filetype:
228 Micro will match this regex against a given filename to detect the filetype. You
229 may also provide an optional `header` regex that will check the first line of
230 the file. For example:
234 filename: "\\.ya?ml$"
240 Next you must provide the syntax highlighting rules. There are two types of
241 rules: patterns and regions. A pattern is matched on a single line and usually a
242 single word as well. A region highlights between two patterns over multiple
243 lines and may have rules of its own inside the region.
245 Here are some example patterns in Go:
249 - special: "\\b(break|case|continue|default|go|goto|range|return)\\b"
250 - statement: "\\b(else|for|if|switch)\\b"
251 - preproc: "\\b(package|import|const|var|type|struct|func|go|defer|iota)\\b"
254 The order of patterns does matter as patterns lower in the file will overwrite
255 the ones defined above them.
257 And here are some example regions for Go:
264 - constant.specialChar: "%."
265 - constant.specialChar: "\\\\[abfnrtv'\\\"\\\\]"
266 - constant.specialChar: "\\\\([0-7]{3}|x[A-Fa-f0-9]{2}|u[A-Fa-f0-9]{4}|U[A-Fa-f0-9]{8})"
272 - todo: "(TODO|XXX|FIXME):?"
278 - todo: "(TODO|XXX|FIXME):?"
281 Notice how the regions may contain rules inside of them. Any inner rules that
282 are matched are then skipped when searching for the end of the region. For
283 example, when highlighting `"foo \" bar"`, since `\"` is matched by an inner
284 rule in the region, it is skipped. Likewise for `"foo \\" bar`, since `\\` is
285 matched by an inner rule, it is skipped, and then the `"` is found and the
286 string ends at the correct place.
288 You may also explicitly mark skip regexes if you don't want them to be
289 highlighted. For example:
301 You may also include rules from other syntax files as embedded languages. For
302 example, the following is possible for html:
309 - include: "javascript"