Bat: --show-all should still highlight syntax

[Swatinem]

Awesome stuff!

However, it would be nice if --show-all would still keep the syntax highlighting.
Currently you can’t use both.

[sharkdp]

Thank you for the feedback.

This was a deliberate choice. I wanted the special characters to stand out from the rest of the text. Otherwise, you would hardly see the control- and whitespace characters.

In addition, it would be impossible to implement with the way this is currently done (a special highlighting syntax for --show-all). It could, however, certainly be implemented if the whole --show-all functionality would be completely rewritten.

[sharkdp]

@Swatinem Any update on this?

[Swatinem]

Oh sorry, I wasn’t aware you were waiting for feedback.

It is definitely a nice-to-have, since it is the way I (and probably some other people as well) have also set up their editor/IDE, to always display invisible characters with syntax highlighting.

But it is definitely not a high priority for me. Like you said, implementing it is probably a lot of work?

[sharkdp]

Yes. This is definitely a lot of work and would require a complete overhaul of the way we show non-printable characters.

I am closing this for now, as I am most likely never going to work on this, but if somebody wants to pick this up, please let me know so I can reopen this ticket. Even if we decide to implement this, I would probably vote for this being opt-in via an additional command line flag.

[DrMcCoy]

Would it be possible to, as a quick hack, add this into the individual syntax highlighters? For example, if I just want to show tabs and spaces for C and C++ files, could I modify those syntax definitions to do that there?

And if that would be possible, can you give me a pointer on where I need to start? I had a quick look into the assets/syntaxes directory, but didn't see something for C/C++ there.

Just for my own personal use; I don't expect you to write or support such a hacky solution :)

[sharkdp]

Would it be possible to, as a quick hack, add this into the individual syntax highlighters? For example, if I just want to show tabs and spaces for C and C++ files, could I modify those syntax definitions to do that there?

I think so, yes.

And if that would be possible, can you give me a pointer on where I need to start? I had a quick look into the assets/syntaxes directory, but didn't see something for C/C++ there.

Make sure you clone the bat repository recursively (or make sure that all submodules are correctly checked out). Then, you should find the C++ syntax under assets/syntaxes/Packages/C++.

Next, copy the C++.sublime-syntax file to ~/.config/bat/syntaxes (or bats config folder on your OS), modify it, and don't forget to always call bat cache --init if you modify that file.

[mikcza]

Yes. This is definitely a lot of work and would require a complete overhaul of the way we show non-printable characters.

Is it still the case? It would be lovely to have --show-all and syntax highlighting at the same time.

[sharkdp]

Yes, this is still the case.

[eth-p]

Theoretically, there's nothing stopping us from doing two passes over each line to get both syntax and unprintable highlighting.

Technically however, bat wasn't designed with that in mind and would need a fair amount of refactoring. Due to extra branching being required, it would also probably hurt performance even when the feature isn't used.