VIM Syntax

My Syntax Files

Note that these require the more recent browsers. The error highlighting in particular seems to need Netscape 4.

How to use these syntax files

The simplest way to use the syntax files is to put them somewhere on your machine, and source them

:so foo.spec
:so bash.spec

augroup syntax
au! BufNewFile,BufReadPost *.spec  so ~/vim/spec.vim
au  BufNewFile,BufReadPost *.spec  so ~/vim/spec.vim
augroup END

Using the bash.vim syntax file is a little trickier, because you want this to fire up whenever you have a #!/bin/bash in the first line. Here's how it's done (or how I do it anyway).

let X = getline(1)
	let y = match(X, "#!/bin/bash" )
	if (y != -1)
		so ~/vim/bash.vim
	endif
unlet X
unlet y

I also recommend the following: Set your colours up so that "function", "conditional" and "repeat" are distinct from "statement". ( I usually use a black background, and set all three to white. ) By default, this is not enabled for gvim in black backgrounds. However, doing this will make your code more readable for this and for other files since it makes your function definitions and conditional blocks more visible. See my .vimrc file to find out how this is done.

• There was a glitch in embedded echos. ')' was added to the list of 'end' characters in shEmbeddedEcho.
  Why: echo $(echo hello) hilights incorrectly otherwise.
• There was a problem with shIdentifier. shDeref was added to contains=
  Why: declare ${X}=0 and similar statements (which are legal) get nasty hilighting otherwise.
• shCommandSub was assigned matchgroup=shOperator. The reason is that this seems to fix several breakages with shCommandSub. I don't know exactly why it does.

New Features added to bash.vim

• BASH builtin environment variables
• Several commands added (especially those used in init/sys admin scripts
• Colouring hacked at (most notably, the do/done case/esac if/fi pairs get their own colour )
• Highlighting for command options improved
• awk.vim syntax file is pulled in for awk -foo '{ }' type command blocks.
• Went through and changed shFoo to bashFoo throughout the file. After all, it is a bash syntax file, right ?

To do

• As it is , there is no shortage of features. Debugging is number 1.