Colorcoder

This plugin for Sublime Text will highlight every variable in its own, consistent color — feature known as semantic highlighting, variable-name highlighting, contextual highlighting — you name it.

Notice how all instances of m_nValue share the same color

Motivation

• “Coding in color” by Evan Brooks
• actually thought about something to improve the current highlighting system and accent the data flow
• help dysgraphic/dyslexic coder

it is important to note i use a crc8 hash of the variable name to give similar named variables distinct colors to improve typo recognition

Installation

Download the zip-ball and unpack to sublime\data\packages or via packageControl. Please make sure to name the resulting folder Colorcoder not Sublime-Colorcoder.

To properly work Colorcoder needs an appropriately modified color scheme. On the first run plugin will try its best to automatically modify your current scheme. :grey_exclamation: the plugin will not actually modify the scheme but create a modified copy in its own directory and apply it. You can use Tools▶Packages▶Colorcoder▶Tweak Colorcode on current color scheme (or CTRLSHIFTP it) to modify the colors a bit (you can change the lightness and saturation). Colorcoder also needs a “good” language definition, which it does not activate automatically but leaves you the choice to do so, read below for more.

Supported Languages

As the few language definitions provided by Sublime are insufficient for optimal Colorcoder results I bundle tailored definitions. So far it's

• C++
• Python
• Lua
• Go
• Ruby
• CoffeeScript (via by @aponxi)

for JavaScript please use the JavaScript Next package.

You can set them up as default via language menu▶Open all with current extension as▶Colorcoder▶… (Colorcoded) or copy them to appropriate folder (erg. Packages/Colorcoder/Python (Colorcoded).tmLanguage to Packages/Python/Python.tmLanguage.

You can also add more scopes for the plugin to colorize via the scopes setting. Colorcoder comes with a handy command colorcoder_inspect_scope which will print the scope of the token under text cursor to the console. You can bind it to a key (e.g. CTRLF12) by adding following to Preferences▶Key Bindings – User

{ "keys": ["ctrl+f12"], "command": "colorcoder_inspect_scope"},

Sometimes things we are interested in don't have distinct scope e.g. the variables in Javascript are only source.js. You would need to modify the .tmLanguage.

• First you need to obtain it - it is inside the same names .sublime-package file, which is a zip-archive

• now locate the first instance of

  <key>patterns</key>
  <array>
  

it should be somewhere within the first 50–100 lines - use code folding to find where according </array> is - place following right before it

<dict>
        <key>comment</key>
        <string>colorize everything</string>
        <key>match</key>
        <string>\b\w+\b</string>
        <key>name</key>
        <string>colorize</string>
    </dict>

or modify the bundled .tmLanguage files, you probably would only need to replace the keywords

Options

You can turn the highlighting off per view via View▶Colorcode this view. Colorcoder also might slow down the editor when highlighting huge files, so it will turn itself off once the file has exceeded the max_size (the check happens when you save the file or reactivate the view). You can force it to highlight the file nevertheless via said menu item (which will read Colorcoding may hurt performance, File is large now) Default (faster) highlighting method makes the undo work letterwise, you can change this by setting use_fast_highlighting_but_undo_typing_letterwise to false. Colorcoder will then use alternative engine, which does not interfer with undo, but work somewhat slower on large files. You might want to tune max_size lower then. Colorcoder allows you to specify white- and blacklist for file-types to highlight: the settings are enabled_for and disabled_for. If enabled_for is present in the config only those file-types will be highlighted, disabled_for won't be highlighted even if present in whitelist. Finally :exclamation: if you use some plugins which change the color scheme based on time, or filename, or modify the schemes you better turn the auto_apply_on_scheme_change off, or the plugin conflict may result in an endless loop which will lock the editor. You can always change the settings even when sublime is not running.

Contact

You can reach me via email: vprimachenko@ya.ru, twitter: @vprimachenko or visit the official irc channel freenode.net#colorcoder (webchat). If Colorcoder was usefull to you i greatly appreciate a donation via Bitcoin 1DzZ1thGTHubRzoxEeDCJnJZwgFpna6jQk.