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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. 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 → Code Completion: 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. Ignore stops flagging the word in every open file until Editora is closed; Add to Dictionary keeps it for good.

What is checked depends on the file type:

• Plain text and Markdown are checked in full, apart from inline code, links, and Markdown fenced code blocks.
• HTML and Typst have the document’s text checked, plus comments. Tags, attributes, <script>, <style> and <pre> blocks, Typst math and Typst lines that open with a # instruction are left alone.
• Source code has only comments and string literals checked, so identifiers aren’t flagged.
• Data and configuration formats are off by default: JSON, YAML, TOML, XML, CSV, INI, properties, .env, Git and SSH configuration, system configuration files, logs, and diffs.

Settings → Spell Check → File Types has a tick box per file type, and Spell Check: Toggle for This File Type (spell.toggleForLanguage) flips the active file’s type. view.toggleSpellCheck turns checking on or off everywhere.

Spell-check commands

Everything on the right-click menu is also a command, so you can work through a file from the keyboard.

Correct Word at Caret opens a list of suggestions to filter and pick from. The other keymaps bind the navigation keys: in CUA, F7 and Shift+F7 go to the next and previous misspelling; in Sublime Text, F6 toggles spell check and Ctrl+F6 / Ctrl+Shift+F6 go to the next and previous misspelling.

Dictionaries

Spell check uses Apache Lucene’s pure-Java Hunspell engine, with no native dependency. English (US and UK), Spanish (Spain and Mexico), and French ship in the app. The default dictionary is set in Settings → Spell Check. The status bar shows the dictionary the active file is checked with; click it, or run Spell Check: Set Language…, to give the file another one. The picker lists the languages by name, marks the current one, and has an entry that returns the file to the default.

Words you add live in dictionary.txt in your config folder. Settings → Spell Check has an editor for the list (spell.manageDictionary) and a switch that turns the personal dictionary off. After editing dictionary.txt outside Settings, run Spell Check: Reload Personal Dictionary.

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