pygments-custom

A custom lexer for Pygments for easily adding extra keyword highlighting by setting environment variables. This module works with any tool that uses Pygments, and is specifically designed for the minted package in LaTeX.

Example usage

export PYGMENTS_CUSTOM_TYPE="[ 'vec3', 'Atom', 'System' ]"
pygmentize -l custom example.c
pdflatex example.ltx

Example output

See the full example.pdf.

Capabilities

You can define any identifier (e.g., vec3) to be any of the subtypes of Keyword that pygments recognizes. As of 2023, pygments uses:

• Keyword.Type ← This is probably what you want.
• Keyword.Constant
• Keyword.Declaration
• Keyword.Namespace
• Keyword.Pseudo
• Keyword.Removed
• Keyword.Reserved
• Keyword (a generic Keyword token)

By default, the CustomLexer inherits Keywords from the C Lexer, but that is easily changed by setting the PYGMENTS_CUSTOM_BASE_LEXER environment variables.

Limitations

• Does not handle regular expressions or Tokens other than Keyword.
• Does not change the Style.

Customization

New keywords can be highlighted as Type, Constant, Namespace, Declaration, Pseudo, Removed, Reserved, or plain old Keyword. To add keywords, set the environment variables PYGMENTS_CUSTOM_TYPE, PYGMENTS_CUSTOM_CONSTANT, ..., PYGMENTS_CUSTOM_KEYWORD.

Each variable is a Python list (square brackets surrounding a comma separated list of quoted strings). For example, this highlights new types (e.g., classes or typedefs):

export PYGMENTS_CUSTOM_TYPE="[ 'vec3', 'Atom', 'System' ]"

Choosing the base lexer class to build upon

The default base class for CustomLexer is the C language lexer, "CLexer" from pygments.lexer.

Pygments comes with over 500 lexers (listed below). To inherit from a different lexer, set the PYGMENTS_CUSTOM_BASE_LEXER environment variable. For example. to extend C++ syntax highlighting, one would do this:

export PYGMENTS_CUSTOM_BASE_LEXER=CppLexer

Install

git clone https://github.com/FSund/pygments-custom-cpplexer.git
cd pygments-custom
(sudo) python setup.py install

Verify

Verify that the package installed correctly by checking if "custom" is in the list of lexers. You can run:

pygmentize -L lexers | grep custom

Using the lexer in latex

Use the custom "language". In LaTeX this means something like this

\begin{minted}{custom}
vec3 position(0.0, 0.0, 0.0);
Atom *atom = new Atom(position);
\end{minted}

You can test it using the example.ltx file like so:

export PYGMENTS_CUSTOM_BASE_LEXER=CppLexer
export PYGMENTS_CUSTOM_TYPE="[ 'vec3', 'Atom', 'System' ]"
pdflatex -shell-escape example.ltx

See the minted package at https://github.com/gpoore/minted for more information.