Lugaru's Epsilon
Programmer's
Editor 14.04

Context:
Epsilon User's Manual and Reference
   Commands by Topic
      . . .
      Fixing Mistakes
         Undoing
         Interrupting a Command
      The Screen
         . . .
         Fonts
         Setting Colors
         Code Coloring
         Window Borders
         The Bell
      Buffers and Files
         Buffers
         Files
         File Variables
         . . .
         Buffer List Editing
      . . .

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Setting Colors  Commands by Topic   Window Borders


Epsilon User's Manual and Reference > Commands by Topic > The Screen >

Code Coloring

Epsilon does syntax-based highlighting for many different programming languages. Set the buffer-specific variable want-code-coloring to 0 to disable this feature or run the change-code-coloring command. To change the colors Epsilon uses, see the previous section. (Because certain modes like Perl and HTML use coloring to quickly parse language syntax, if you don't want to see the coloring it's often better to change the color selections so they're identical instead of disabling code coloring entirely.)

If you use a very old and slow computer, you may need to tell Epsilon to do less code coloring, in order to get acceptable response time. Set the variable minimal-coloring to 1 to tell Epsilon to look only for comments, preprocessor lines, strings, and character constants when coloring. Epsilon will color all identifiers, functions, keywords, numbers and punctuation the same, using the c-ident color class for all. This makes code coloring much faster.

When Epsilon begins coloring in the middle of a buffer, it has to determine whether it's inside a comment by searching back for comment characters. If you edit extremely large C files with few block comments, you can speed up Epsilon by telling it not to search so far. Set the variable color-look-back to the number of characters Epsilon should search through before giving up. Any block comments larger than this value may not be colored correctly. A value of zero (the default) lets Epsilon search as far as it needs to, and correctly colors comments of any size.

When Epsilon isn't busy acting on your keystrokes, it looks through the current buffer and assigns colors to the individual regions of text, so that Epsilon responds faster as you scroll through the buffer. For smoother performance, Epsilon doesn't begin to do this until it's been idle for a certain period of time, contained in the idle-coloring-delay variable. This holds the number of hundredths of a second to wait before computing more coloring information. By default, it's 100, so Epsilon waits one second. Set it to -1 to disable background code coloring.

Normally Epsilon colors buffers as needed. You can set Epsilon to instead color the entire buffer the first time it's displayed. Set the variable color-whole-buffer to the size of the largest buffer you want Epsilon to entirely color at once.

Standard bindings:

    change-code-coloring
 



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Lugaru Epsilon Programmer's Editor 14.04 manual. Copyright (C) 1984, 2021 by Lugaru Software Ltd. All rights reserved.