Improve syntax highlighting

[KubaO]

In #docs

@fafalone

fafalone — Yesterday at 11:06 AM
syntax highlighting; GitHub vba was much nicer than the current vb6 plus covered x64 extensions; was it changed because the tool to export can't support it?

Ideally we should use the same syntax highlighter that GitHub uses on their page.

[KubaO]

Microsoft uses highlight.js in their documentation. So we'll have to plumb that into Jenkins to do the offline highlighting in place of rouge.

[KubaO]

Looking more into it, what highlighter.js does isn't super special. It can be easily translated from javascript to Ruby as that is about 1500 lines of code - core+vb lexer. Rouge alredy does most of what we need. Rouge works in two (or three stages): lexing, postprocessing (optional), formatting. We take the Rouge VB Lexer, copy it to tb.rb, then expand with all the goodies we need. We can also copy an existing html formatter and modify it to emit links to the documentation for keywords, statements, operators, etc.

I'll start by making a Rouge lexer just as able as the one in twinBASIC IDE, then deploy it with the same color theme used in twinBASIC (the light variant). Eventually as we add a light/dark switch in the documentation, we can also use a dark theme for the highlighter.

Doc links will make sense once I get more documentation done.

[WaynePhillipsEA]

The IDE could easily offer a Copy as HTML option, including classes for syntax highlighting, if that helps?

[KubaO]

That would be a cool feature for sure, but it won't help me much. I'm already in the weeds writing the highlighter. It's rather understandable code, even if you don't know Ruby (I sure don't!), so you'll probably be able to look at it and find omissions or my mistakes.