How to Syntax Highlight in a RichTextBox [C#]?

Question

How do I syntax highlight in a richtextbox control and . 和突出显示语法。 I will be publishing a lightweight notepad to the web soon and I want it to have syntax highlighting. I am using Windows forms. Can someone post a code example?

Answer 1

• RichTextBox syntax highlighting (talks about RichTextBox itself - minimal features but exactly what you asked for here)
• A textbox/richtextbox that has syntax highlighting? [C#] (talks mostly about other ways of doing it)

Answer 2

The Scintilla control is an excellent source code editor that includes syntax highlighting amongst a whole range of other features. You can embed it in your own app and there is a .NET wrapper available.

With Scintilla you can specify the keywords and it will then apply the syntax highlighting as you type.

Answer 3

Are you using WinForms or WPF?

If WPF, you could have a look at AvalonEdit . It's free and open source, and it's used in SharpDevelop (open source IDE).

Answer 4

You can change the font of selected words in the richtextbox. Take a look at the Select and SelectedFont properties of the control.

But essentially, you need to iterate through the words, check if a word is present in your keywords, and then change the font, using the above-mentioned properties.

Answer 5

Not exactly an answer to your question, but have you looked at the text editor component from SharpDevelop ? It's quite lightweight (<200kB IIRC), can be easily embedded in WinForms applications and has syntax highlighting for several languages built in.

Otherwise, you might want to look at this CodeProject page . It reformats the RTF while you type, which is not very efficient for large files, and it contains a few creepy catch (Exception) { } blocks, so I'm not sure if I would use it in a life-critical application, but it's definitely a good starting point to see how it can be done.

Answer 6

Syntax highlighting is not an easy task to perform efficiently. Many solutions you can find (like the ones involving modification of RTF) are a one time solution. If you want to highlight and un-highlight words on the fly during edition, your code has to be ready for it. I would not reinvent the wheel and use ICSharp.TextEditor or alike to solve your problem.