Set language for syntax highlighting in Visual Studio Code

Question

Before the confusion begins  this question is about Code  the new lightweight Visual Studio Editor  You can get it from here  https   code visualstudio com   I have a textfile   txt  with CSS in it and want to get syntax hightlighting  You can open the command palette with ctrl shift p  But there you can not set syntax like in Sublime   Is there any other way to get the CSS coloring in from my textfile

User · Answer

Syntax Highlighting for custom file extension

Any custom file extension can be associated with standard syntax highlighting with custom files association in User Settings as follows.

Note that this will be a permanent setting. In order to set for the current session alone, type in the preferred language in Select Language Mode box (without changing file association settings)

Installing new Syntax Package

If the required syntax package is not available by default, you can add them via the Extension Marketplace (Ctrl+Shift+X) and search for the language package.

You can further reproduce the above steps to map the file extensions with the new syntax package.

User · Answer

In the very right bottom corner  left to the smiley there was the icon saying  Plain Text   When you click it  the menu with all languages appears where you can choose your desired language

User · Answer

To permanently set the language syntax  open settings json file     format all txt files with javascript formatting     files associations                txt    javascript           format all unsaved files  untitled-1 etc  to javascript    files associations              untitled-     javascript

User · Answer

Note that for  quot Untitled quot  editor   quot Untitled-1 quot    quot Untitled-2 quot    you now can set the language in the settings  The previous setting was   quot files associations quot              quot untitled-  quot    quot javascript quot      This will not always work anymore  because with VSCode 1 42  Q1 2020  will change the title of those untitled editors  The title will now be the first line of the document for the editor title  along the generic name as part of the description  It won t start anymore with  quot untitled- quot  See  quot Untitled editor improvements quot  Regarding the associated language for those  quot Untitled quot  editors   By default  untitled files do not have a specific language mode configured  VS Code has a setting  files defaultLanguage  to configure a default language for untitled files  With this release  the setting can take a new value  activeEditorLanguage  that will dynamically use the language mode of the currently active editor instead of a fixed default  In addition  when you copy and paste text into an untitled editor  VS Code will now automatically change the language mode of the untitled editor if the text was copied from a VS Code editor    And see workbench editor untitled labelFormat in VSCode 1 43

User · Answer

Press Ctrl   KM and then type in  or click  the language you want   Alternatively  to access it from the command palette  look for  Change Language Mode  as seen below

User · Answer

Another reason why people might struggle to get Syntax Highlighting working is because they don t have the appropriate syntax package installed  While some default syntax packages come pre-installed  like Swift  C  JS  CSS   others may not be available   To solve this you can Cmd   Shift   P    install Extensions  and look for the language you want to add  say  Scala      Find the suitable Syntax package  install it and reload  This will pick up the correct syntax for your files with the predefined extension  i e   scala in this case   On top of that you might want VS Code to treat all files with certain custom extensions as your preferred language of choice  Let s say you want to highlight all   es files as JavaScript  then just open  User Settings   Cmd   Shift   P    User Settings   and configure your custom files association like so      files associations            es    javascript

[editor] Set language for syntax highlighting in Visual Studio Code

Syntax Highlighting for custom file extension

Installing new Syntax Package

Examples related to editor

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