Pollen for Visual Studio Code

This extension adds support for the Pollen publishing system, including:

• High quality syntax highlighting with great scoping support for most of the Pollen Markup and preprocessor formats (.pm, .pp, .p)
• Syntax highlighting for the special pagetree file
• Code snippets tailored to the filetype, such as highlight block for the markup files and define function for the preprocessor files
• Special syntax highlighting for html.p and html.pp files which combines the highlighting of both the html and the pollen code
• Embedded code syntax highlighting both for builtin as well as custom highlight-type functions

This extension adds syntax highlighting for Pollen constructs only, and thus depends on external Racket highlighting packages in some cases. We highly recommed our users to use this extension alongside the Racket for VS Code package — its Racket highlighting support is one of the best you can find.

Syntax highlighting

The theme used in the screenshots is customized One Dark Pro. The code samples are taken from this article.

All common Pollen filetypes are supported; you can see how a sample style.css.pp looks like:

The extension also has special handling for the html.p and html.pp files, which are commonly used to provide a rendering template for the content:

The extension naturally also supports Pollen Markup; the highlighting is mostly similar to the preprocessor files, but has one extra feature: the embedded code (not necessarilly Racket code) in the highlight function is highlighted based on the embedded language semantics. Currently the extension recognizes the following programming languages:

• Racket
• Python
• Haskell
• Swift
• Javascript
• HTML
• CSS

Embedded LaTeX blocks get syntax highlighting as well, provided you use the recommended function/tag names $ and $$; that is, you embed LaTeX like this: ◊${\frac{1}{2}}.

This is an image showcasing the embedded language highlighting (Racket code):

Defining own highlight functions/tags

The highlight function is exported by pollen/unstable/pygments. If you are using highlight.js instead of pygments (or if you have your own highlighting function), be sure to name the tag/function as highlight or some string which has "highlight" in it; that is the rule the regexps in the Pollen Markup grammar are looking for. The embedded language should then be supplied to the function as a pygments-style quoted symbol argument. You can see one such function in the screenshot above.

The syntax highlighting of the embedded code depends on external syntax-highlighting extensions, so be sure to have those installed.

Snippets

The extension adds general code snippets to all of the Pollen files, and also some specialized ones for concrete filetypes. The current list of snippets is:

• Insert the lozenge symbol
• Define a new variable
• Reference an existing variable
• Insert a tag with text body
• Insert a tag with text body and arguments
• Insert a highlight block (Pollen Markup only)
• Insert a parent-level pagenode (Pagetree only)

Pollen and Markdown

This extension does not support Pollen Markdown (.pmd), and I don't plan to add the support in the future, because the use of Pollen Markdown (and Markdown in general) is discouraged by the author of Pollen, Matthew Butterick. If you really need to use Markdown with Pollen and this extension, use the general preprocessor mode.

Issues

If you need help with Pollen, check out the great Pollen documentation, as well as some of the existing Pollen projects & guides (scroll to bottom).

If you encounter any problems with the extension, be sure to open an issue on this repo and I'll try to fix it as fast as possible.

Should you have any feature request or an idea how to improve this extension, please open an issue (or better, a PR). I'm not a great coder (or regexer, if you will), and don't have much experience with Pollen, so I might have messed up something.