Which applications support Apex/Visualforce syntax highlighting?

Question

Apart from Force.com's internal editor and Force.com IDE / Eclipse, which applications support syntax highlighting for Apex and Visualforce.

I just found a definition file for Vim, but could not find any for other popular editors and writing systems, i.e. Gedit and SublimeText for editing, and Sphinx/Pygments for documenting.

What other syntax highlighting resources do you know? How would I write my own definition? Is there a reference on Force.com?

Answer 1

You could use Notepad++ and create a User Defined Language file for Apex (maybe based off of the Java language file) and also one for VisualForce (maybe the HTML language file with the addition of the VF tags).

Alternatively you can use Notepad++ with the Java and HTML languages selected when viewing Apex and VisualForce content respectively. It wouldn't be perfect but it would be better than raw text.

If you do create language files for Notepad++, consider publishing them for the world to use too!

Creating a User Defined Language File

SourceForge Notepad++ User Defined Languages list

Answer 2

On the Mac, checkout MavensMate for Sublime and TextMate: https://github.com/joeferraro/MavensMate-SublimeText

https://github.com/joeferraro/MavensMate

As Mark notes, anything that has a plugin structure and an existing plugin for Java/HTML or Java/JSP will translate almost 1:1 to Apex/Visualforce - with the exception of filename detection and some of the custom annotations/DML/SOQL stuff.

Answer 3

Checkout BrainEngine windows only for desktop version, but they have a cloud version based on Silverlight?

Pretty cool! Still in beta, but the video on the site demos it's code-hinting which looks solid once they get the kinks worked out!