NextBASIC VSCode Syntax

ZX Spectrum NextBASIC syntax highlighting for Visual Studio Code.

Video: how to setup your NextBASIC dev workflow

This video installation walk through is shown on a Mac but is the same process for Windows and Linux: Watch on YouTube

Features

• Import and export binary NextBASIC files
• Full NextBASIC syntax, including new ; comment support
• Jump to definition for GO TO and PROC statements
• Symbol lookup (for DEFPROC and DEF FN)
• Renumbering for whole doc, selected lines or line swap
• Simple syntax validator
• Indentation support
• ctrl/cmd+enter will insert a new line with line number pre-populated
• Format on edit and format full document
• Collapse DEFPROC
• Help on hover
• Export to .bas as +3DOS format or .tap
• Support directives: #autostart n, #autoline n,m, #program str and custom #define key=value (and replaces #key instances in BASIC)

Cspect support

Prerequisites:

• Install Cspect (see right hand sidebar)
• Install hdfmonkey (ideally stored in $PATH) (Windows version here)
• (MacOS only) Install mono via brew install mono

Important Windows users ensure you use the hdfmonkey build from uto.speccy.org (link above) - it's built without cygwin as a dependency.

Update nextbasic configuration in VS Code, which requires the location of cspect.exe (yes, even on a Mac) and the Next img file.

Video explanation coming soon.

Note that using NextBASIC: run with cspect will overwrite your autoexec.bas file on the cspect image.

Hat tips

Credit to Rob Uttley for solving the autoexec and #autostart.

Credit to @kounch for their superb original work on vscode_zx (cspect, ZEsarUX and zxbasic - BASIC to asm support)

Original syntax based specifically on the work by jsanjose - and modified to specifically support NextBASIC.