Hi,
Is there a relatively easy way to add a custom language to xcode? (templates, syntax highlighting, etc.)
I often work in "R", a statistical programming language and would love to use xcode to write my code.
Thanks!
Mac OS X (10.7)
noah977 wrote:
Is there a relatively easy way to add a custom language to xcode? (templates, syntax highlighting, etc.)
No. Xcode only fully supports a few of the most popular languages. There are resources to support an even greater number of languages, but not all of them are enabled. FORTRAN, for example, seems to be supported internally, but isn't "turned on". I see no support for R at all.
Almost every other IDE I've used in the past has language "definition" files somewhere. Adding a language was simply a matter of creating the proper definition file.
XCode must have something similar. Finiding it and deciphering the file format is the tricky part.
noah977 wrote:
XCode must have something similar. Finiding it and deciphering the file format is the tricky part.
Finding and deciphering isn't all that difficult. The files are here:
/Developer/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DVTFoundation.framework/Versions/A/Resource s/
/Developer/Library/PrivateFrameworks/XcodeEdit.framework/Versions/A/Resources/
How to get Xcode to recognize a new language is another story. I have tried to inspire the FORTRAN people to do that since they seem very upset that FORTRAN doesn't have syntax coloring in Xcode4. There is a "Fortran.xclangspec" file in there, but I wasn't able to get Xcode to use it. I admit that I didn't try that hard. If you could figure out how to get FORTRAN syntax highlighting to work, the FORTRAN programmers would really appreciate it, and you could probably hack-in R support as well. Of course, it may not be possible at all, so don't get too excited.
PS: Make sure to have good backups before hacking on Xcode internals.
custom language for xcode
