Re: "apply-tag": how to change behavior?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 12:10:53PM -0400, Allin Cottrell wrote:
> I'm working on a simple built-in editor for my program, using a
> GtkTextView.  I'd like to add dynamic syntax highlighting (simple
> example: if a line begins with '#' it's a comment and will be shown in
> a different color).
>
> I think the functions I want are gtk_text_buffer_apply_tag() and
> gtk_text_buffer_remove_tag(), but I don't want the default behavior of
> applying a tag to a specified start-end range, rather I want the tag
> to apply "from now until further notice" as the user types.
>
> I guess that to achieve this I need to catch the "apply-tag" signal
> for the text buffer and customize the response, but I'm having
> difficulty figuring out what the response should look like.

One way you might do this is to connect_after() to insert_text and
have the signal handler apply the tag to the just-inserted text.

You can't really change what apply_tag does, because that will break
most of the API.

You might also look at just using the gtksourceview library, it's
required for gedit and seems like a pretty complete syntax
highlighting solution.

Havoc