sheharyarn
Elixir Syntax Highlighting on Stackoverflow
I would really like to see Syntax Highlighting support for Elixir on Stackoverflow. Someone already created a topic on Meta StackExchange but since SE relies on an external syntax highlighting tool (Google’s code-prettify), there hasn’t been any work to support Elixir (even though an issue was also opened there over a year ago).
I’m interested in making this happen (as someone who spends 5+ hours daily on SO - especially in the Elixir tag). So my questions are:
- How do I get started in adding Elixir support to code-prettify?
- How do I represent Elixir constructs that need to be highlighted?
- And should I even send in a pull request? There seems to be minimal activity in the project, and many pull requests haven’t been merged or closed for a while.
First Post!
nietaki
I was thinking about the same thing and slowly started looking into that. It seems like the syntax highlighting definitions for erlang or Scala aren’t really that complicated, and I would argue Scala has a more ambiguous syntax than Elixir.
It also seems like the code-prettify project is still pretty alive and they do accept PRs, so that’s all looking good.
Is there a good place to get Elixir’s grammar or something similar? It would probably help make the highlighter more comprehensive.
Most Liked
nietaki
It feels like I’m mostly talking to myself here, but here’s the PR for the Elixir support: Add Elixir language support by nietaki · Pull Request #478 · googlearchive/code-prettify · GitHub
nietaki
Allow me to bump the topic, since I run into ugly, non-highligthed code on SO once more and it boiled my blood a bit again.
To summarise the situation, the feature has been requested four and a half years ago and about a year ago I wrote the highlighter necessary for the SO people to integrate Elixir highlighting with their site without breaking much of a sweat. Still, there hasn’t been any progress on the issue since, and it looks like SO has a policy on not improving syntax highlighting on the site ever again.
While I have no reason to be optimistic about the whole situation, it feels like it would be good to raise the profile of the feature request, or otherwise nothing is going to change. From what I’m reading the best bet is to upvote the request and add/or add a bounty for it. I’d happily do it myself, but I don’t have enough karma on Meta Stack Exchange…
Soo I guess what I’m saying is: Does anyone have some Meta Stack Exchange karma to use for a good cause? :]
Edit: I’m curious, which of the other Most Loved Languages according to SO Developer Survey 2017 don’t have the syntax highlighting support 
notriddle
Breaks when I type this in:
"I love me some #{ "string" <> "y" } interpolation"
It might not support hilighting inside string interpolation, but it should at least ignore quotes inside of an interpolated part, so it doesn’t just look wrong.
Last Post!
ismaelga
If anyone still cares about this, a quick upvote here could help: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/360682/syntax-highlight-request-elixir
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