A Sublime Text 4 syntax highlighting package for the KDL cuddly document language

Introduction

This package adds support for the KDL document language, both versions 1 and 2 (for files with .kdl extension, but also with .kdl1/.kdl2 if you want to force a specific version)

Install

• Via Package Control: open Command Palette → Package Control: Install Package → kdl
                                          ^Ctrl/⌘Cmd⇧ShiftP

• Manually: clone this repository to your Packages directory and rename it to kdl

cd /path/to/sublime/packages/directory
git clone https://github.com/eugenesvk/sublime-kdl.git
mv sublime-kdl KDL

• Your color scheme likely needs to be patched to ignore or take full advantages of the /-slashdashed comment blocks:
  Patched examples used for the screenshots below: solarized, default
  • to style /-slashdashed elements with muted colors:
    • add -comment to your scopes, e.g., {"name":"Tag name","foreground":"var(blue6)","scope":"entity.name.tag -comment"},
    • add a copy of the same rule with an extra comment scope and a blending color function, e.g., {"name":"Tag name C","foreground":"color(var(blue6) blend(#000 60% hsl))","scope":"entity.name.tag comment"},
  • to style /-slashdashed elements like regular comments add comment.line.slash-dash.kdl scope to your Comment rule (e.g., {"name":"Comment","foreground":"black","scope":"comment, comment.line.slash-dash.kdl"},) so that its 4 level specificity overrides other rules like entity.other.attribute-name

Use

Open any kdl file (e.g., syntax_example_screen.kdl) and verify that the selected syntax is KDL and KDL-specific contexts are properly scoped¹ and highlighted, maybe like so (depending on your color scheme):

Exposed scopes

See a list of scope names in Scope.md

Keybindings

2 new keybindings scoped to kdl: "/' auto-pair double/single quotes even after string modifiers

Disable by adding "kdl.keybind_disable":true to your Preferences.sublime-settings

Known issues

• Only works in Sublime Text 4 since build 4075 (10 July 2020) since it's using version 2 of the syntax
• KDL v2 """multiline string""" dedent feature isn't supported, think it's impossible with the ST's syntax engine to use a later match of spaces before the last """ in all earlier indentation matches
• /-kdl-version 1 or 2 prefix doesn't affect ST's bottom right syntax indicator, it will still be KDL without a version specifier due to the limitations of ST
• AFileIcon extension's Plain Text (KDL) blank syntax may override this extension's syntax file. As far as I understand, updating to the latest versions of both packages and manually deleting the plain text variant should resolve the issue.

Misc

As part of developing this syntax I've significantly reformatted the current grey blob of text that is Spec's grammar into a better structured KDL document with syntax highlighting, see Grammar2.kdl

Credits

The default packages' syntax files (Python, Bash, PHP), as well as fish and vscode-kdl

Footnotes

1. scope naming is supposed to conform to ST's scope naming guidelines ↩