VS Code Property List Syntax Highlighting

This is a conversion of the Property List (XML) TextMate grammar to an injection grammar for XML. It also includes the code snippets from the TextMate bundle.

Features

• Syntax highlighting for XML Property Lists
• Code snippets for Property List headers and tags
• Compatible with XML extensions
• Compatible with Mike Cunneen's Property List Editor (updated) and David Nicolson's Binary Plist
• Just configuration files, no binaries or scripts.

Syntax Highlighting

Code Snippets

Configuration

Add this to your settings.json

{
	"files.associations": {
		"*.plist": "xml",
		"*.mobileconfig": "xml"
	}
}

FAQ

Why an injection grammar?

This started as a direct conversion of the original TextMate grammar but two problems quickly appeared.

1. VS Code's automatic language detection was determined to mark all Property Lists as XML and nothing I did could prevent it from doing so 100% of the time.

2. Defining a language called plist caused conflicts with other extensions for Property Lists that do the same and changing it to something else caused a different set of conflicts.

Pivoting to an injection grammar solved both issues.

Wait, What is an injection grammar?

A standard TextMate grammar defines a language and is responsible for tokenising every character in a file of that language. A theme then maps colours to those tokens.

An injection grammar builds upon an existing grammar by injecting additional tokenisation rules into it.

It doesn't look like the syntax highlighting is working

This is likely due to how your current theme deals with semantic highlighting or maps colours to TextMate scopes. You can try setting "editor.semanticHighlighting.enabled": false or test with a different theme.

Does this do formatting?

Nope, but the advantage of it being an injection grammar for XML means you can use your XML formatter of choice. I recommend Red Hat's XML extension.

Release Notes

1.0.0

Initial release