Re: Vim syntax highlighting for *roff (was: Bug#1019257: ...)

[Nate Bargmann]

At the risk of starting an editor skirmish.  ;-)

* On 2022 06 Sep 15:05 -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> 
> I didn't _finish_ to my satisfaction--I ran into some kind of problems
> involving the boundaries of the highlighting vs. the boundaries of the
> lexical matching, which made some nested escape sequences not render to
> my satisfaction.  (I am demanding in this regard.)  Even after much
> reading of the Vim manual and experimentation I couldn't get this to
> work the way I wanted.  I am prone to using perverse cases for testing.

This is where it seems neovim (nvim) is taking a lead.  I've not
examined all of this yet as I installed their provided .deb for nvim
0.7.2 on a laptop a couple of weeks back and made sure my rather simple
vimrc didn't cause it to hork up a hairball.  It was fine.  I've yet to
do the same on this desktop but I have some time on my hands for a few
weeks so I might get there.

One of the things that nvim brings is LSP (Language Server Protocol)
which is touted to be quite powerful for things like syntax
highlighting.  I've only read about it have not taken the dive into it
yet but the claims are that it allows for much more fine-grained parsing
of source than vimscript's regex based system ever could.

I am still getting familiar with the nvim ecosystem as it appears large
and daunting but even with Vim 9 released earlier this year and its
backward breaking changes to its new vimscript, I think it has reached
its end in some ways even though I am certain there are several more
major versions on its horizon, so I am looking at neovim as the next
logical step.  Note that I'm barely an intermediate in all things Vim so
hardly an expert to turn to!

- Nate

-- 
"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all
possible worlds.  The pessimist fears this is true."
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