Syntax highlighting support?

[p4vook]

One thing that has always stopped me from using vi is a lack of syntax highlighting.
Is it possible to implement syntax highlighting while keeping the code and philosophy clean?

[lichray]

I thought about highlighting some keywords or matching parenthesizes with underscores or bold text. But all these require some parsing, and these are specific to languages.

[kyx0r]

@pavel-the-best If that's the case see https://github.com/kyx0r/nextvi

[unrealapex]

Is it possible to implement syntax highlighting while keeping the code and philosophy clean?

I think this would be possible if only bare essential highlights were made. Everyone can agree that dimming comments and coloring matching delimiters are helpful.

these require some parsing, and these are specific to languages.

Dimming shell and C comments would be a good start since nvi already has the comment option which seems to parse comments "in shell, C and C++ language files" according to the man page. Highlighting matching delimiters should be able to be implemented in a language agnostic way.