Language Support

Introduction

Support for languages like HTML, JavaScript and CSS is currently a core part of Brackets. Support on the same level cannot easily be added by extensions. This page documents our efforts to change that.

Ongoing work

• Introduced a new high-level concept "language" and refactored support for LESS based on that (Pull Request)

Caveats

A difficulty when making comments more generic is that we rely on the defined comment symbols to be completely contained in one CodeMirror token. I.e. we cannot define "//~" as the prefix for line comments (like SciTE does) because it is not a prefix of the "//" token.

Notes

Features we think should be able to be built as plug-ins

From the Extensibility Proposal

• Access to code model
• Quick open / go to symbol
• Index files/code (background process)
• Better code hinting for "supported" languages (e.g. for a particular framework)
• JSLint tools
• Inline editor providers (e.g. CSS gradient editor)
• Language-specific search and replace (e.g. HTML tag search and replace)
• Code cleanup / refactoring tools

LiveDevelopment considerations

• What hooks would need to be added where to allow extension-based language support?
  LiveDevelopment.registerDocumentClass(...)
• What behavior would need to be configurable by extensions?
  turning off auto-reload for LESS files, configuring CodeMirror
• What deployment scenarios do we want to support?
  Dynamic client-side, dynamic server-side, static server-side?
• Do we need to integrate with 3rd-party build tools?
  I.e. run ant/cake/... when changing a LESS file to initiate compliation to CSS
• Do we need a specification to delegate compilation to an existing server?
  The server might use a compiler written in a language other than JS, or might use a JS compiler with specific options that can't be easily extracted
• What can we support without impacting performance too much?
  Running a build tool for every character entered will not work
• How should the user configure Brackets to support server-side compilation?
  What file needs to be compiled how when changed - setting for the entire project or a subdirectory? Exceptions for single files?
• How do we deal with distributed files?
  LESS supports including other LESS files, so changes to these should trigger compilation of the master file