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SyntaxTextAreaFX

A JavaFX code editor with syntax highlighting, built on RichTextFX. Used by the SIPS workbench, and usable on its own.

Features

  • Syntax highlighting for 120 of the 121 languages LANGS lists — keywords, strings and comments, at minimum; a handful of hand-written languages (Java, C/C++, JavaScript, ...) get finer-grained rules on top. See Supported Languages for the full list, or call SyntaxTextAreaFX.implementedLanguages() at runtime.
  • Language selection either by name (setCodingStyle(LANGS.python)) or by guessing from a file name (languageForFile("script.py")).
  • Theming via CSS: a built-in default theme, plus addStyleSheet(String) to layer your own style sheet on top.
  • Keyword autocomplete: typing two or more letters of a keyword pops up matching completions for the current language, sourced from that language's getKeywords().

Requirements

  • Java 21+
  • JavaFX 21 (pulled in transitively as a Maven dependency — no separate SDK install needed)

Usage

SyntaxTextAreaFX editor = new SyntaxTextAreaFX();
editor.setCodingStyle(SyntaxTextAreaFX.CONSTANTS.LANGS.java);
someContainer.getChildren().add(editor.getNode());

Not every language in LANGS has highlighting rules written for it yet — check first if you're populating a language picker:

if (SyntaxTextAreaFX.isLanguageImplemented(LANGS.rust)) {
    editor.setCodingStyle(LANGS.rust);
}

An unimplemented language falls back to plain text rather than failing.

Building from source

mvn package   # runs the test suite and produces target/SyntaxTextAreaFX-<version>.jar
mvn install   # same, plus installs the jar to your local Maven repository

Adding a language

Highlighting rules live in src/main/java/.../langs/, one class per language, implementing the Language interface (meta/Language.java). Most were generated from gtksourceview's language definitions (jsons/*.json) by the dev tool at meta/Generator.java — see its class Javadoc for the generate-review-wire workflow. A new language needs an import, a case in SyntaxTextAreaFX#loadLanguage(), and an entry in its IMPLEMENTED set.

TO DO

  • Autocomplete is keyword-list-based only — it doesn't know it's inside a string or comment, or what's actually in scope. Real context-aware completion needs an actual parser per language, not the regex-pattern architecture this project has; a much larger undertaking than the keyword popup.
  • LANGS.j has no highlighting rules — its keyword definitions embed gtksourceview template syntax that isn't valid regex on its own