Vscode-jupyter: Add Markdown syntax highlighting for markdown cells

[nickolasclarke]

When using the jupyter notebook data science features, It gets especially hard to read long markdown cells without any sort of syntax highlighting. It would be great leverage the markdown syntax highlighting for any markdown cells.

[ronglums]

Great suggestion! We'd have to investigate if it's feasible.

[SpencerPark]

I would also really like to see this feature added. Doing some reading about how to add syntax highlighting to a vscode extension it seems like an injection grammar with an embedded language would allow the creation of a "py percent" language that uses the existing highlighters.

I would guess that we'd need an _injection_ after line comments (punctuation.definition.comment.python) and _embed_ markdown in there.

The catch being that this needs to follow a # %% [markdown] directive but maybe someone else could help here? There is a markdown codefence injection example on github suggesting we could inject after the start of a line comment, and our embedded language would then need to match that %% [markdown] (or similar) pattern in order to begin. Hopefully taking control until either a line that doesn't begin with a comment or a regular cell # %% is encountered.

Another challenge is that we can't just embed the markdown language without somehow stripping the leading #. Not sure how well this would play with the embedding as it keeps getting broken up.

I know this is just rough notes but the intention was to say it looks feasible. I think this is a really nice feature to have, as someone who writes just as much prose as code in a jupyter notebook, the wall of green text is not as nice as the little bit of color from markdown highlighting could be :)

[SimonCrios]

Great idea! It's really a hardship that write markdown in comments of python script because of the lack of hightlighting.
However, what color should be used to highlight seems to be a difficult choice. I do not want to have a script which is totally a mixture of python and markdown that I can not judge whether this part is a markdown or python scripts.

[greazer]

Moved to Parking lot one more time. I expect it will NOT move back to New Issues.

[zhaouv]

I am trying on this fork and branch. Just a prototype now.

https://github.com/zhaouv/vscode-python

[zhaouv]

almost done, todo:

• [ ] fix multi level list
• [ ] fix not stopping fenced code
• [ ] fix quote

[zhaouv]

Finally found a perfect implementation, a total of 47 lines will solve all problems.

[zhaouv]

As this issue was transferred here, the link to my pr of vscode-python disappeared. I'm not obligated to work the way they want me to. And they do not have an internal contributor working on it. So the feature is published as a new extension.