When I do development, my favorite editor is gedit. Sure, I know there are other IDEs out there with lots more bells and whistles, but I like to keep it simple. I’ve recently come back to the Ionic Framework with a new project I’m working on. The new version of Ionic uses “TypeScript,” a language that compiles to JavaScript. When I went to open TypeScript files using gedit, I was bummed that there was no syntax highlighting! Just plain gray text in the entire file.
So, I looked into how I could add text highlighting for a currently unsupported language in gedit. The files that define the syntax highlighting for gedit are located (for me at least) in:
/usr/share/gtksourceview-3.0/language-specs/
The language files have the extension *.lang. After trying to create a TypeScript language file myself with minimal success, I finally managed to get the right Google search of “gedit lang file for typescript” and found that someone had already created one. It’s on github here.
I then just downloaded this file, placed it in the directory above (using sudo cp in the terminal to do so), restarted gedit, and it worked!
Code Brew 