Syntax Definitions

Syntax definitions make Sublime Text aware of programming and markup languages. Most noticeably, they work together with colors to provide syntax highlighting. Syntax definitions define scopes that divide the text in a buffer into named regions. Several editing features in Sublime Text make extensive use of this fine-grained contextual information.

Essentially, syntax definitions consist of regular expressions used to find text, as well as more or less arbitrary, dot-separated strings called scopes or scope names. For every occurrence of a given regular expression, Sublime Text gives the matching text its corresponding scope name.

Prerequisites

In order to follow this tutorial, you will need to install AAAPackageDev, a package intended to ease the creation of new syntax definitions for Sublime Text. It lives in a public Mercurial repository at Bitbucket.

Download the latest .sublime-package file and install it as described in Installation of .sublime-package Files.

File format

Sublime Text uses property list (Plist) files to store syntax definitions. However, because editing XML files is a cumbersome task, we’ll use JSON instead, and convert it to Plist format afterwards. This is where the AAAPackageDev package (mentioned above) comes in.

Note

If you experience unexpected errors during this tutorial, chances are AAAPackageDev is to blame. Don’t immediately think your problem is due to a bug in Sublime Text.

By all means, do edit the Plist files by hand if you prefer to work in XML, but always keep in mind their differing needs in regards to escape sequences, etc.

Scopes

Scopes are a key concept in Sublime Text. Essentially, they are named text regions in a buffer. They don’t do anything by themselves, but Sublime Text peeks at them when it needs contextual information.

For instance, when you trigger a snippet, Sublime Text checks the scope bound to the snippet and looks at the caret’s position in the file. If the caret’s current position matches the snippet’s scope selector, Sublime Text fires it off. Otherwise, nothing happens.

Scopes can be nested to allow for a high degree of granularity. You can drill down the hierarchy very much like with CSS selectors. For instance, thanks to scope selectors, you could have a key binding activated only within single quoted strings in Python source code, but not inside single quoted strings in any other language.

Sublime Text inherits the idea of scopes from Textmate, a text editor for Mac. Textmate’s online manual contains further information about scope selectors that’s useful for Sublime Text users too.

How Syntax Definitions Work

At their core, syntax definitions are arrays of regular expressions paired with scope names. Sublime Text will try to match these patterns against a buffer’s text and attach the corresponding scope name to all occurrences. These pairs of regular expressions and scope names are known as rules.

Rules are applied in order, one line at a time. Each rule consumes the matched text region, which therefore will be excluded from the next rule’s matching attempt (save for a few exceptions). In practical terms, this means that you should take care to go from more specific rules to more general ones when you create a new syntax definition. Otherwise, a greedy regular expression might swallow parts you’d like to have styled differently.

Syntax definitions from separate files can be combined, and they can be recursively applied too.

Your First Syntax Definition

By way of example, let’s create a syntax definition for Sublime Text snippets. We’ll be styling the actual snippet content, not the .sublime-snippet file.

Note

Since syntax definitions are primarily used to enable syntax highlighting, we’ll use the phrase to style to mean to break down a source code file into scopes. Keep in mind, however, that colors are a different thing from syntax definitions and that scopes have many more uses besides syntax highlighting.

Here are the elements we want to style in a snippet:

  • Variables ($PARAM1, $USER_NAME…)
  • Simple fields ($0, $1…)
  • Complex fields with placeholders (${1:Hello})
  • Nested fields (${1:Hello ${2:World}!})
  • Escape sequences (\\$, \\<…)
  • Illegal sequences ($, <…)

Note

Before continuing, make sure you’ve installed the AAAPackageDev package as explained above.

Creating A New Syntax Definition

To create a new syntax definition, follow these steps:

  • Go to Tools | Packages | Package Development | New Syntax Definition
  • Save the new file in your Packages/User folder as a .JSON-tmLanguage file.

You now should see a file like this:

{ "name": "Syntax Name",
  "scopeName": "source.syntax_name",
  "fileTypes": [""],
  "patterns": [
  ],
  "uuid": "ca03e751-04ef-4330-9a6b-9b99aae1c418"
}

Let’s examine now the key elements.

uuid
Located at the end, this is a unique identifier for this syntax definition. Each new syntax definition gets its own uuid. Don’t modify them.
name
The name that Sublime Text will display in the syntax definition drop-down list. Use a short, descriptive name. Typically, you will use the name of the programming language you are creating the syntax definition for.
scopeName
The top level scope for this syntax definition. It takes the form source.<lang_name> or text.<lang_name>. For programming languages, use source. For markup and everything else, use text.
fileTypes
This is a list of file extensions. When opening files of these types, Sublime Text will automatically activate this syntax definition for them.
patterns
A container for your patterns.

For our example, fill the template with the following information:

{   "name": "Sublime Snippet (Raw)",
    "scopeName": "source.ssraw",
    "fileTypes": ["ssraw"],
    "patterns": [
    ],
    "uuid": "ca03e751-04ef-4330-9a6b-9b99aae1c418"
}

Note

JSON is a very strict format, so make sure to get all the commas and quotes right. If the conversion to Plist fails, take a look at the output panel for more information on the error. We’ll explain later how to convert a syntax definition in JSON to Plist.

Analyzing Patterns

The patterns array can contain several types of elements. We’ll look at some of them in the following sections. If you want to learn more about patterns, refer to Textmate’s online manual.

Matches

Matches take this form:

{ "match": "[Mm]y \s+[Rr]egex",
  "name": "string.ssraw",
  "comment": "This comment is optional."
}
match
A regular expression Sublime Text will use to find matches.
name
The name of the scope that should be applied to any occurrences of match.
comment
An optional comment about this pattern.

Let’s go back to our example. Make it look like this:

{ "name": "Sublime Snippet (Raw)",
  "scopeName": "source.ssraw",
  "fileTypes": ["ssraw"],
  "patterns": [
  ],
  "uuid": "ca03e751-04ef-4330-9a6b-9b99aae1c418"
}

That is, make sure the patterns array is empty.

Now we can begin to add our rules for Sublime snippets. Let’s start with simple fields. These could be matched with a regex like so:

\$[0-9]+
# or...
\$\d+

However, because we’re writing our regex in JSON, we need to factor in JSON’s own escaping rules. Thus, our previous example becomes:

\\$\\d+

With escaping out of the way, we can build our pattern like this:

{ "match": "\\$\\d+",
  "name": "keyword.source.ssraw",
  "comment": "Tab stops like $1, $2..."
}

And we can add it to our syntax definition too:

{   "name": "Sublime Snippet (Raw)",
    "scopeName": "source.ssraw",
    "fileTypes": ["ssraw"],
    "patterns": [
        { "match": "\\$\\d+",
          "name": "keyword.source.ssraw",
          "comment": "Tab stops like $1, $2..."
        }
    ],
    "uuid": "ca03e751-04ef-4330-9a6b-9b99aae1c418"
}

We’re now ready to convert our file to .tmLanguage. Syntax definitions use Textmate’s .tmLanguage extension for compatibility reasons. As explained above, they are simply XML files, but in Plist format.

Follow these steps to perform the conversion:

  • Select Json to tmLanguage in Tools | Build System
  • Press F7
  • A .tmLanguage file will be generated for you in the same folder as your .JSON-tmLanguage file
  • Sublime Text will reload the changes to the syntax definition

You have now created your first syntax definition. Next, open a new file and save it with the extension .ssraw. The buffer’s syntax name should switch to “Sublime Snippet (Raw)” automatically, and you should get syntax highlighting if you type $1 or any other simple snippet field.

Let’s proceed to creating another rule for environment variables.

{ "match": "\\$[A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9_]+",
  "name": "keyword.source.ssraw",
  "comment": "Variables like $PARAM1, $TM_SELECTION..."
}

Repeat the above steps to update the .tmLanguage file, and restart Sublime Text.

Fine Tuning Matches

You might have noticed, for instance, that the entire text in $PARAM1 is styled the same way. Depending on your needs or your personal preferences, you may want the $ to stand out. That’s where captures come in. Using captures, you can break a pattern down into components to target them individually.

Let’s rewrite one of our previous patterns to use captures:

{ "match": "\\$([A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9_]+)",
  "name": "keyword.ssraw",
  "captures": {
      "1": { "name": "constant.numeric.ssraw" }
   },
  "comment": "Variables like $PARAM1, $TM_SELECTION..."
}

Captures introduce complexity to your rule, but they are pretty straightforward. Notice how numbers refer to parenthesized groups left to right. Of course, you can have as many capture groups as you want.

Arguably, you’d want the other scope to be visually consistent with this one. Go ahead and change it too.

Begin-End Rules

Up to now we’ve been using a simple rule. Although we’ve seen how to dissect patterns into smaller components, sometimes you’ll want to target a larger portion of your source code that is clearly delimited by start and end marks.

Literal strings enclosed by quotation marks or other delimiting constructs are better dealt with by begin-end rules. This is a skeleton for one of these rules:

{ "name": "",
  "begin": "",
  "end": ""
}

Well, at least in their simplest version. Let’s take a look at one that includes all available options:

{ "name": "",
  "begin": "",
  "beginCaptures": {
    "0": { "name": "" }
  },
  "end": "",
  "endCaptures": {
    "0": { "name": "" }
  },
  "patterns": [
     {  "name": "",
        "match": ""
                  }
  ],
  "contentName": ""
}

Some elements may look familiar, but their combination might be daunting. Let’s see them individually.

begin
Regex for the opening mark for this scope.
end
Regex for the end mark for this scope.
beginCaptures
Captures for the begin marker. They work like captures for simple matches. Optional.
endCaptures
Same as beginCaptures but for the end marker. Optional.
contentName
Scope for the whole matched region, from the begin marker to the end marker (inclusive). Effectively, this will create nested scopes for beginCaptures, endCaptures and patterns defined within this rule. Optional.
patterns
An array of patterns to match only against the begin-end’s content—they aren’t matched against the text consumed by begin or end themselves.

We’ll use this rule to style nested complex fields in snippets:

{ "name": "variable.complex.ssraw",
   "begin": "(\\$)(\\{)([0-9]+):",
   "beginCaptures": {
       "1": { "name": "keyword.ssraw" },
       "3": { "name": "constant.numeric.ssraw" }
   },
   "patterns": [
       { "include": "$self" },
       {  "name": "string.ssraw",
          "match": "."
       }
   ],
   "end": "\\}"
}

This is the most complex pattern we’ll see in this tutorial. The begin and end keys are self-explanatory: they define a region enclosed between ${<NUMBER>: and }. beginCaptures further divides the begin mark into smaller scopes.

The most interesting part, however, is patterns. Recursion, and the importance of ordering, have finally made their appearance here.

We’ve seen above that fields can be nested. In order to account for this, we need to style nested fields recursively. That’s what the include rule does when we furnish it the $self value: it recursively applies our entire syntax definition the text captured by our begin-end rule. This portion excludes the text individually consumed by the regexes for begin and end.

Remember, matched text is consumed; thus, it is excluded from the next match attempt.

To finish off complex fields, we’ll style placeholders as strings. Since we’ve already matched all possible tokens inside a complex field, we can safely tell Sublime Text to give any remaining text (.) a literal string scope.

Final Touches

Lastly, let’s style escape sequences and illegal sequences, and then we can wrap up.

{  "name": "constant.character.escape.ssraw",
   "match": "\\\\(\\$|\\>|\\<)"
},

{  "name": "invalid.ssraw",
   "match": "(\\$|\\<|\\>)"
}

The only hard thing here is getting the number of escape characters right. Other than that, the rules are pretty straightforward if you’re familiar with regular expressions.

However, you must take care to place the second rule after any others matching the $ character, since otherwise you may not get the desired results.

Also, even after adding these two additional rules, note that our recursive begin-end rule from above continues to work as expected.

At long last, here’s the final syntax definition:

{   "name": "Sublime Snippet (Raw)",
    "scopeName": "source.ssraw",
    "fileTypes": ["ssraw"],
    "patterns": [
        { "match": "\\$(\\d+)",
          "name": "keyword.ssraw",
          "captures": {
              "1": { "name": "constant.numeric.ssraw" }
           },
          "comment": "Tab stops like $1, $2..."
        },

        { "match": "\\$([A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9_]+)",
          "name": "keyword.ssraw",
          "captures": {
              "1": { "name": "constant.numeric.ssraw" }
           },
          "comment": "Variables like $PARAM1, $TM_SELECTION..."
        },

        { "name": "variable.complex.ssraw",
          "begin": "(\\$)(\\{)([0-9]+):",
          "beginCaptures": {
              "1": { "name": "keyword.ssraw" },
              "3": { "name": "constant.numeric.ssraw" }
           },
           "patterns": [
              { "include": "$self" },
              { "name": "string.ssraw",
                "match": "."
              }
           ],
           "end": "\\}"
        },

        { "name": "constant.character.escape.ssraw",
          "match": "\\\\(\\$|\\>|\\<)"
        },

        { "name": "invalid.ssraw",
          "match": "(\\$|\\>|\\<)"
        }
    ],
    "uuid": "ca03e751-04ef-4330-9a6b-9b99aae1c418"
}

There are more available constructs and code reuse techniques, but the above explanations should get you started with the creation of syntax definitions.