Tksyntex

Syntax Highlighting for Tkinter Text Widgets

Overview

Tksyntex provides real‑time syntax highlighting for tkinter.Text widgets. It reuses lexers and color schemes from the Pygments library, giving you access to many languages and beautiful themes out of the box.

Installation

pip install pygments

No other dependencies are required (the module itself is just one file, Tksyntex.py).

Usage

from Tksyntex import SyntaxHighlighter

# ... after creating your tkinter Text widget ...
self.highlighter = SyntaxHighlighter(
    text_widget=tktext,
    language="cpp",
    style_name="default",
    debounce_ms=200   # milliseconds to wait before rehighlighting while typing
)

If you want to highlight a file whose language you know:

# Map file extensions to Pygments lexer names
extension_to_lexer = {
    ".py": "python",
    ".js": "javascript",
    ".c":  "cpp",
    ".java": "java",
    ".html": "html",
    ".css": "css",
    ".go": "go",
    ".rs": "rust",
    ".sh": "bash",
    ".json": "json",
    ".sql": "sql",
    ".md": "markdown",
    ".ini": "ini",
    ".h": "cpp",
}

# Then, based on your file's extension:
self.highlighter.set_language(lang)

For plain text or when you don’t want any highlighting, simply skip the set_language call, or use "text" for language.

Important: This module is not a full text editor. It does not handle line numbers, auto‑indentation, or any other editor features. It only provides syntax highlighting on top of a standard tkinter Text widget.

Complete Minimal Example

Here’s a self‑contained script that opens a tkinter window with a Text widget and highlights a small C++ code snippet:

import tkinter as tk
from Tksyntex import SyntaxHighlighter

if __name__ == "__main__":
    root = tk.Tk()
    root.title("Tksyntex Demo")

    # Create a Text widget
    text = tk.Text(root, wrap="none")
    text.pack(fill="both", expand=True)

    # Insert some C++ code
    code = '''#include <iostream>

int main() {
    std::cout << "Hello, world!" << std::endl;
    return 0;
}
'''
    text.insert("1.0", code)

    # Create the highlighter (debounce only matters during live editing)
    highlighter = SyntaxHighlighter(
        text_widget=text,
        language="cpp",
        font_name="consolas",
        font_size=14,
        style_name="material",  # monokai for dark, default for light
        debounce_ms=100
    )

    highlighter.highlight() # "text" for no highlighting

    root.mainloop()

This will display the code with syntax highlighting as soon as the window appears.

How It Works

• SyntaxHighlighter uses Pygments to parse the widget’s content and apply the correct tags (colours, fonts) to code tokens.
• Highlighting is triggered:
  • Initially after text is loaded into the Text widget
  • Afterwards, whenever the content changes (debounced to avoid performance issues while typing).
  • When ever the highlight method is called (highlighter.highlight())
• The style_name parameter accepts any Pygments style name (e.g., "monokai", "colorful", "native").
  and can be changed with highlighter.set_language method.

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