RIS Syntax Highlighting / RIS Citation & Bibliography Support

Clean, semantic syntax highlighting, code snippets, and reference folding for RIS (.ris) bibliography files.

Overview

The RIS Citation & Bibliography Support extension adds first-class support for Research Information Systems (.ris) bibliographic citation files in VS Code, Antigravity IDE, and compatible editors.

RIS is a standardized tag format widely used by reference management tools such as Mendeley, Zotero, EndNote, RefWorks, and academic publishers (IEEE, ACM, Springer, Taylor & Francis, ScienceDirect). This extension makes large bibliographic exports readable, structured, and easy to navigate.

Features

• 🎯 Record Boundary Delimiters (TY / ER)

  • Delimiters TY (record start) and ER (record end) are prominently highlighted using control keyword scopes, clearly framing each citation.
  • Publication type codes following TY (e.g., JOUR, BOOK, CONF, THES) are styled distinctly to identify the reference type at a glance.

• 🎨 Semantic Field Highlighting

  • Titles & Journals (TI, T1, T2, T3, BT, CT, ST, JO, JF, JA, J1, J2) are styled with heading scopes (markup.heading.ris) so article and journal names stand out immediately.
  • Authors & Contributors (AU, A1, A2, A3, A4, ED, TA) use distinct author variable scopes (variable.other.author.ris) with highlighted comma separators (Last, First).
  • Dates, Years & Numeric Metadata (PY, Y1, Y2, DA, VL, IS, SP, EP, SN, NV) use numeric constant styling (constant.numeric.ris).
  • Keywords (KW) are highlighted with constant keyword scopes (support.constant.keyword.ris).
  • Separators ( -) use neutral punctuation styling to keep the layout clean and uncluttered.

• 🔗 Smart Link & DOI Detection

  • Direct link fields (UR, DO, LK, L1, L2, L3, L4) are automatically recognized and styled with link underline formatting.
  • Embedded URLs (https://...) and DOIs (10.xxxx/...) appearing inside abstract paragraphs, titles, or notes are also detected and highlighted as links.

• ⚡ Built-in Citation Snippets

  • Quickly scaffold new references using built-in tab-completion prefixes:
    • ris-jour — Journal Article (TY - JOUR)
    • ris-book — Book (TY - BOOK)
    • ris-conf — Conference Proceeding (TY - CONF)
    • ris-thes — Thesis / Dissertation (TY - THES)

• 📝 Multiline Continuation & Unknown Tag Fallback

  • Fields such as abstracts (AB) and notes (N1) spanning multiple lines without repeating the tag prefix are seamlessly highlighted as continuations.
  • Any 2-character tag matching the standard format (^[A-Z][A-Z0-9] - ) is cleanly parsed, preventing proprietary or vendor-specific tags from disrupting the rest of the document.

• 📂 Code Folding by Reference

  • Easily fold (collapse) and expand each individual reference in the editor gutter, allowing you to quickly navigate files containing hundreds or thousands of citations.

• 🌗 Universal Theme Compatibility

  • Built strictly with standard TextMate scopes (keyword.control, entity.name.tag, entity.name.type, markup.heading, variable.other, constant.numeric, support.constant, markup.underline.link, string.unquoted, punctuation.separator).
  • Works out of the box with default Dark, Dark Modern, Light, Light Modern, Monokai, and Solarized themes without requiring customized color rules.

Example

TY  - JOUR
AU  - Silva, J.
AU  - Santos, M. A.
TI  - Machine Learning Architectures for Bibliographic Data
PY  - 2023
JO  - Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
VL  - 12
IS  - 3
SP  - 100
EP  - 115
DO  - 10.1000/xyz123
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1000/xyz123
AB  - This abstract spans across multiple lines in the export file
without repeating the tag prefix on subsequent lines.
Additional details are available at https://example.org/project-info.
KW  - artificial intelligence
KW  - citations
KW  - machine learning
ER  - 

Installation

From Open VSX Registry / VS Code Marketplace

Search for RIS Citation & Bibliography Support (decobeto.ris-syntax-highlighting) in your editor's Extensions tab (Ctrl+Shift+X) and click Install.

Manual Installation via VSIX

Download the latest ris-syntax-highlighting-0.2.0.vsix from the Releases page and run:

code --install-extension ris-syntax-highlighting-0.2.0.vsix

Or in Antigravity IDE:

antigravity-ide --install-extension ris-syntax-highlighting-0.2.0.vsix

Contributing & Issues

Contributions, suggestions, and issue reports are welcome!

• GitHub Repository: decobeto/RIS-Syntax-Highlighting-Extension
• Changelog: CHANGELOG.md
• Issue Tracker: GitHub Issues

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.