Italic syntax highlighting in Visual Studio 2005

11 July 2007 .NET coding fontsVisual Studio

I came across a posting by Thomas Restrepo about a theme for Vim he likes called Wombat and how it wouldn’t be worth porting to Visual Studio as it doesn’t support italic syntax highlighting – as we all know.

This got me thinking and I was able to port it with italics although the process is a bit of a hack.

If I can figure out a way of making this hack re-distributable without infringing on copyrights I’ll follow this one up.

In the meantime here’s a screen-shot of it in action using Consolas.

Visual Studio 2005 with italics

I can’t stand using vim for .NET – I’ve got better things to do than commit the entire .NET Framework to memory. I remember watching a WPF screen-cast where the guy was using “his trusty editor” (vim or emacs – I forget ;-) and going on about the great keyboard short-cuts whilst constantly trying different method names, compiling yet again and finally looking up help in the absence of IntelliSense.

I did however check out the latest trunk of SharpDevelop this weekend and was quite impressed with both the product and the source code. There was a bit of flickering with the solution explorer and the icons seem to be a bit of a steal-and-mash but otherwise looks first class.

[)amien

7 responses

  1. Avatar for Rik Hemsley

    Well, you don't have to use Vim, you can use ViEmu in VS.NET.

    Rik Hemsley – 11 July 2007
  2. Avatar for Tomas Restrepo

    That looks pretty cool. Do you mind sharing what the trick was? :)

    Tomas Restrepo – 11 July 2007
  3. Avatar for Damien Guard

    It involves modifying files so I'm trying to put together a binary patcher as I obviously can't redistribute the files themselves.

    Damien Guard – 11 July 2007
  4. Avatar for steve

    I still use Vim as a general purpose text viewer / editor, even though I use VS for actually writing code. It's just very useful for quickly examining / altering patch files, scripts, XML, config files, sometimes hacking VS project files manually because it's faster than using a wizard / property page etc. I'm not a fan of trying to use VS for absolutely everything, I tend to pick and choose the best tool for each job.

    steve – 11 July 2007
  5. Avatar for Damien Guard

    Well the trick is to basically modify the italic version of the font to give it a new name and to present itself as bold.

    I intend on putting together a simple app to do this to any installed font but in the mean time I did it by hand on my own Envy Code R font.

    Damien Guard – 19 August 2007
  6. Avatar for Blorg

    Did you ever write that app? I've been mucking around with a hex editor and the TTF spec, but have only succeeded in screwing up my fonts royally so far :)

    If there's no app, do you have any hints about which bits to flip?

    Blorg – 19 August 2008
  7. Avatar for Damien Guard

    I decided against after consulting with a few people but you can probably achieve a similar effect using FontForge or other font editing programs (just make sure they preserve hinting)

    Damien Guard – 19 August 2008