Home

Awesome

KeywordClassifier Visual Studio Extension

This is a sample extension for Visual Studio that shows how to to customize the syntax highlighting. The current version supports VS2010, VS2012 and the VS2013 preview.

The extension was originally built as a custom Clasiffier component, but later changed to a custom Tagger component after beta 2 was released, because it offered better performance.

The extension supports C#, C/C++, and JavaScript, but support for other languages can be added easily. Each type of keyword highlighted can also be customized through new classifications in the Fonts and Colors section of the Visual Studio Options dialog.

Keywords that are customized include:

  1. Control Flow Keywords (if, foreach, while, etc.). Customized through the "Keyword - Control Flow" classification.
  2. LINQ Keywords (select, from, where, join, etc.). Customized through the "Operator - LINQ" classification.
  3. Visibility Keywords (public, private, etc.). Customized through the "Keyword - Visibility" classification.

Extension sample

Starting with version 1.4, syntax highlighting of escape sequences in strings is also supported, through the "String Escape Sequence" classification:

Extension sample

The extension is posted on the Visual Studio Gallery at http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/862fbd13-4a20-44db-b94c-5854e2672b0d

Build and Installation

  1. Install the Visual Studio 2010 SDK. You'll need it for building custom extensions.
  2. Open the solution in Visual Studio 2010 and build it.
  3. Close all open VS2010 instances.
  4. Using Windows Explorer, navigate to the project's output folder and double click on the KeywordClassifier.vsix generated.

That's it!

Customization

It is now possible to customize which keywords get highlighted for each of the 3 categories the extension supports for each supported language:

  1. Create a new registry key in HKEY_CURRENT_USER: Software\Winterdom\VS Extensions\KeywordClassifier
  2. Create a new string value under this key for each language/category you want to customize. Possible languages are CSharp and Cpp. Possible categories are ControlFlow, Linq and Visibility. So, for example, to change which Linq keywords get highlighted for C#, just create a value named CSharp_Linq and set it to a comma-separated list of keywords.