Languages & highlighting

Syntax highlighting

Highlighting uses TextMate grammars through tm4e. When you open a file, Editora maps its extension (or, for a Dockerfile, its name) to a bundled grammar and tokenizes the document line by line. Tokenization is stateful, so block comments and heredocs highlight correctly across lines, and incremental, so an edit re-tokenizes only from the changed line, off the UI thread. Token colors come from the active editor theme.

Files without a bundled grammar are left unstyled rather than guessed at.

Supported languages

Grammars ship for Java, Astro, XML, shell, PowerShell, DOS batch, Python, Groovy, Kotlin, Ruby, C, C++, Rust, Go, C#, Markdown, JSON, CSS, HTML, YAML, INI, SQL, TypeScript, JavaScript, PHP, Lua, Dockerfile, Terraform, TOML, Mermaid, and the HTTP request format. The TypeScript grammar also covers plain JavaScript.

Astro files use the official Astro TextMate grammar, including mixed frontmatter, HTML, and CSS regions. The same language integration supplies Structure symbols and can connect to astro-ls for code intelligence.

Folding, comment syntax, and auto-indent rules are wired per language alongside the grammar. Many extension-less dotfiles and named config files (e.g. .editorconfig, .gitignore and other .*ignore files) are matched by name, so they get highlighting too (and the matching language server when enabled).

Autocomplete

Completion appears as you type, debounced and kept off the hot path. Java member completion triggers immediately after ., while identifier completion begins after a short pause. Other word completion won’t trigger below a two-character prefix.

• Code buffers get a popup that merges sources and ranks them: language-server results (when LSP is on), then snippets, then nothing buried. Press Enter or Tab to accept. Complete result lists filter locally and obsolete server requests are cancelled as you keep typing. Accepting a snippet starts a tab-stop session; accepting a Java LSP item can safely add its import after continued typing, grouped with the completion as one undo/redo action.
• Prose buffers (plain text and Markdown) get inline ghost text, a muted suffix you accept with Tab.

Trigger manually with C-M-i or M-/. Completion also fires on a language server’s advertised trigger characters, so < in HTML or : in CSS pops the popup. In the popup, Up / Down and C-n / C-p move the selection, and Esc or C-g dismisses it.

The code popup is IntelliJ-style: per-kind icons (class, method, keyword, snippet, and so on), the matched characters highlighted, deprecated items struck through, and a documentation popup beside the list. The docs popup shows automatically and toggles with C-q (Edit: Toggle Completion Documentation).

Toggles live in Settings → Editor: a master switch plus per-source switches for words (prose), snippets, and Mermaid keywords. Palette equivalents are view.toggleAutocomplete and the per-source variants.

Spell checking

Misspelled words get a red wavy underline. Right-click for suggestions (pick one to replace), Add to Dictionary, or Ignore. In source files only comments and string literals are checked, so identifiers aren’t flagged; plain text and Markdown are checked in full.

It uses Apache Lucene’s pure-Java Hunspell engine, with no native dependency. English (en_US, en_GB), Spanish, and French ship in the app. Pick a dictionary per file with Spell Check: Set Language…, set a default in Settings, or toggle checking with view.toggleSpellCheck. Words you add live in dictionary.txt in your config folder.

A bundled technical-terms dictionary (config, async, middleware, kubernetes, and the like) keeps code-adjacent words from being flagged; toggle it in Settings or with view.toggleTechnicalDictionary.