DetectSyntax

Support

If you find DetectSyntax helpful, please consider making a donation.

Description

DetectSyntax is a plugin for Sublime Text 2 that allows you to detect the syntax of files that might not otherwise be detected properly. For example, files with the .rb extension are usually Ruby files, but when they are found in a Rails project, they could be RSpec spec files, Cucumber step files, Ruby on Rails files (controllers, models, etc), or just plain Ruby files. This is actually the problem I was trying to solve when I started working on this plugin.

Installation

DetectSyntax can be installed in a variety of ways:

• Through Package Control [http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/package_control] (http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/package_control)

  Open Package Control
  Select 'Install Package'
  Find and select 'DetectSyntax'

• By cloning this repository in Packages

    cd into your Packages folder  
    git clone git://github.com/phillipkoebbe/DetectSyntax.git .
  

• By downloading the files and placing them in a directory under Packages, such as DetectSyntax or User

  If you don't put the files in Packages/User (you can, but probably shouldn't), make sure they live in Packages/DetectSyntax. If you download and extract a compressed archive from GitHub, the directory will be phillipkoebbe-DetectSyntax. Remove phillipkoebbe-.

Usage

DetectSyntax is based on the idea that there are rules for selecting a certain syntax. You define the rules, the plugin checks them. The first one to pass wins. If you have need of multiple conditions that must be met, you should use the function rule. See the default settings file for more on function rules.

Create your own rules in Packages/User/DetectSyntax.sublime-settings. The easiest way to get started is to just copy the default settings file found in Packages/DetectSyntax/DetectSyntax.sublime-settings to your user directory and modify it to meet your needs. Make sure you rename the default_syntaxes key to just syntaxes. If you don't, you will overwrite the default syntaxes and they will not work.

See the default settings file for examples and comments related to creating rules.

Credits

It all started by forking the plugin created by JeanMertz (1). I modified it quite extensively until I ended up with something entirely my own (2). @maxim and @omarramos commented on the gist and suggested it should be part of Package Control. As I had created it solely for my own consumption, it seemed a bit "hard-coded" to be valuable as a package, but then I took a look at SetSyntax (3) and saw how using settings would make it very flexible. That set me on the path that led to DetectSyntax.

(1) [https://gist.github.com/925008] (https://gist.github.com/925008)
(2) [https://gist.github.com/1497794] (https://gist.github.com/1497794)
(3) [https://github.com/aparajita/SetSyntax] (https://github.com/aparajita/SetSyntax)

History

2012-04-13

• Renamed the syntaxes key to default_syntaxes so it is no longer necessary to duplicate default rules in User/DetectSyntax.sublime-settings.

2012-03-23

• Added rule type of 'binary' which builds a shebang regexp for the user.

2012-03-22

• Check to make sure the syntax file exists before trying to set it. [Closes #3, thanks tito]