What you are looking for is called Syntax Highlight. Are you asking this for the terminal? I think this is a property of the shell. Fish has it builtin and for ZSH, there is a plugin: https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting I don’t know if its possible with Bash.
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Tried it out and it works! Thanks!
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Yeah, it’s slow. I use it currently (because of better vi mode support) but plan to switch back to zsh.
Yes, I am looking for a syntax highlighter for the terminal. The one I use is called Kitty.
It would make sense for the terminal to handle syntax highlighting since that would match how editors work. But the convention is that the shell handles highlighting, not the terminal. You can check which shell you are running with the command,
$ echo $SHELLIt’s done that way because the shell is a running program that is capable of telling the terminal which colors to show (by mixing color escape sequences into text). Compare that to code in an editor which is text, not a running program so the only option is for the editor to handle highlighting[1]. Editors need syntax files to configure highlighting for all the different programming languages, while terminals don’t need this because the shell tells them what colors to show.
[1] setting aside the “semantic highlighting” LSP capability - that was invented long after syntax highlighting conventions were established
Fish shell
You can change the used shell in the configs. At least for Alacritty, when I used it (dont care, it was still kinda broken, I just use Konsole)
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I suggest trying this one for Zsh, over the more common one: https://github.com/zdharma-continuum/fast-syntax-highlighting
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zsh-syntax-highlighting
There’s also a fork called fast-syntax-highlighting, I use it.
Powershell does this on Windows. May also work on Linux?
Yes: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/install/installing-powershell-on-linux
Should you choose to install it, it will bring the total of people running powershell on linux to one :)
(I’m kidding, of course, more or less)
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Never used powershell (thanks heavens, I’ve not touched windows since windows 7). Is it similar to nushell?
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Yes! Zsh-syntax-highlighting is a starting point to look at. You can also use fish shell
