Syntax highlighting in Vim

[barryk]

I want to use Vim because of its ability to convert code to color-highlighted HTML. I have compiled Vim and tested this with other code (ex: C), however I cannot get Vim to recognise the bacon.vim file.

The syntax files are in /usr/share/vim/syntax, and if I put bacon.vim into there, it is ignored.

I can manually choose Qbasic highlighting and conversion to HTML works nicely.

Do you know what I need to do to get Vim to recognise and use the bacon.vim file?

The menu does have a feature to list all available syntax files, and bacon is not listed.

Note that I am totally new to Vim/vi. It was daunting at first, but I managed to get it running with a nice GTK gui.

Regards,
Barry Kauler

[Pjot]

Hi Barry,

Within VIM, you can use the commands:

:syntax enable
:set syntax=bacon

But this is tedious, of course So for VIM I also setup the file recognition configuration, and I do so in my homedirectory. As follows:

peter@Solarstriker:~$ ls -l ~user/.vim/
totaal 16
drwxr-xr-x 2 peter peter 16 2010-06-06 14:09 ftdetect
drwxr-xr-x 2 peter peter 16 2010-06-06 14:08 syntax

In the directory ~user/.vim/ftdetect, add a file called 'bacon.vim'. It has the following contents:

au BufRead,BufNewFile *.bac    set filetype=bacon


Then, instead of /usr/share/vim/syntax, but in the directory ~user/.vim/syntax, you can add the BaCon syntax file.

Now when you start VIM and load a BaCon program, syntax recognition should work automatically.

Regards
Peter

[Pjot]

PS of course you can use system wide configuration also, by using the directories /usr/share/vim/syntax (as you did for the syntax file) and /usr/share/vim/ftdetect for the file recognition....

[barryk]

Yippee it works, it works!

Thanks again. I wanted to start work again on my BaCon web pages, with some simple tutorials. Previously I have been using Nicoedit (which uses gtksourceview) and taking snapshots of the screen to get color-highlighted-code images for my tutorials -- not very satisfactory.

Now, I need to put this Vim together as a PET package so that other Puppy Linux users can do this too.

[Pjot]

Great!

By the way, you can use the VIM command ":TOhtml" to generate syntax colored HTML file for the code which currently is loaded. This is what I am using myself for the BaCon website also.

Regards
Peter

[barryk]

Puppy Linux users, here is a PET package for Vim, which includes the bacon.vim syntax highlighting:

bkhome.org/blog/?viewDetailed=02174

This was compiled in Wary Puppy 5.1.1, but should work in other puppies.