Intellisense and Method Tips for lisp?

Hi Chris,

That's easy to do. You want to set up KeyPressTriggers for the "(" and " " characters.

Take a look at our C# language sample. It makes triggers for "." and "<". You want to do the same thing except for your characters and you have to determine what lexical state they are valid in.

After you do that, the SyntaxEditor.Trigger event will fire whenever those keys are pressed while within that lexical state and you can display your member lists. Our sample project shows this in the "editor_Trigger" event.

the single sample is enormous! I can't tell how much of it I need to do. is there something simpler? a "hello, syntaxeditor" sample?

For making a simple member list with items you just want to populate yourself, go to the "editor_Trigger" event handler and search for the "XMLCommentTagListTrigger" case statement. Within the case statement code is the barebones sample of populating and showing a member list.

It's more or less just this...
1) Set an imagelist
2) Clear the list of items
3) Add your items
4) Show the list

I'm trying to set up a language file, but when I feed it the following file, it gives me a NullReferenceException (below): System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
at ActiproSoftware.SyntaxEditor.SyntaxLanguage._1(SyntaxLanguageCollection )
at _26._1(XmlTextReader , String )
at ActiproSoftware.SyntaxEditor.SyntaxLanguage._1(Stream , Int32 )
at ActiproSoftware.SyntaxEditor.SyntaxLanguage.LoadFromXml(String path, Int32 encryptionKey)
at ActiproSoftware.SyntaxEditor.Document.LoadLanguageFromXml(String filename, Int32 encryptionKey)
at actiprotest.Form1.Form1_Load(Object sender, EventArgs e) in c:\temp\foo\actiprotest\actiprotest\form1.cs:line 29
at System.Windows.Forms.Form.OnLoad(EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.Form.OnCreateControl()
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.CreateControl(Boolean fIgnoreVisible)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.CreateControl()
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WmShowWindow(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.ScrollableControl.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.ContainerControl.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.Form.WmShowWindow(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.Form.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.ControlNativeWindow.OnMessage(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.ControlNativeWindow.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.Callback(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam)

It's probably because you didn't define any lexical states or patterns. Most user errors in the XML definitions fail more gracefully and give a lot of info but this one must have slipped through the cracks.

So what's the minimum legal language definition file?

The language definition has to tell the lexical parser how to parse so at a minimum you need a DefaultState and several pattern groups. Plus you need Styles to set when each pattern group is matched.

If you're starting new, I'd recommend copying one of our language defs and change it to fit your needs. The BatchFile one is able as simple as a language definition can be so that's probably a good starting point.

Also, in the Documentation, look at the "XML Language Definition Specification" section. Starting at the SyntaxLanguage tag, you can see exactly what tags are optional and required. Then go down through each tag. It's pretty thorough.