Support semantic highlighting

[hackwaly]

Like WebStorm and VS does: eg. Symbol is a type or parameter or namespace or unresolved ...

Textmate based grammars are hard to do this. Since we did support Diagnostics, why not support semantic highlighting?

[dbaeumer]

Fully agree and we already discussed it since we would like to have it in VS Code as well.

[daviwil]

I'd love to have this for the PowerShell extension also. We provide the ability to create "dynamic keywords" for the purpose of writing domain-specific languages. Semantic highlighting would allow us to colorize those keywords in VS Code even though they aren't part of the PowerShell language spec.

/cc Bruce Payette (@BrucePay)

[smarr]

I was looking for that as well.

What's exactly the meaning of the current 'highlighting' for read/write/text (see document highlights)?

I implemented that part but didn't see any for of visual feedback in the editor.

[cdietrich]

DocumentHighlight is for "mark occurrences"

[smarr]

Christian Dietrich (@cdietrich) sorry for hijacking the topic, but this is very unclear to me. How is document highlights used to realize a 'mark occurrences" feature? How does the read/write/text distinction fit in, and why does it only expect a single result in return? For mark occurrences, I'd expect to be able to return a collection, no?

Would be great if that could be clarified also in protocol.md.

[cdietrich]

Stefan Marr (@smarr) yes you are right. this makes no sense. i asume the return type should be an array.
if i have a look at vscode i can find

export interface DocumentHighlightProvider {
        provideDocumentHighlights(model: editor.IReadOnlyModel, position: Position, token: CancellationToken): DocumentHighlight[] | Thenable<DocumentHighlight[]>;
    }

thus looks like a bug in the protocol

[smarr]

Christian Dietrich (@cdietrich) thanks, I'll open a separate issue.

[svenefftinge]

Please find a proposal in PR #124

[jpike88]

I’m guessing this is dead... anyone got any updates?

[svenefftinge]

I am working on a new proposal for semantic coloring.

[rcjsuen]

There is a proposal in the microsoft/vscode-languageserver-node repository now that I suggest others take a look at when they get a chance.

Dirk Bäumer (@dbaeumer) Suggest to close #513 in favour of this or the other way around.