Dirkster.HL 1.0.3

ThemedHighlightingManager for AvalonEdit

This AvalonEdit extension implements its own highlighting manager that extends the normal way of handling highlighting definitions.

The inital release contains 5 highlighting themes:

• Dark
• Light
• True Blue-Light
• True Blue-Dark
• VS 2019-Dark

but you can easily define more themes. Just create a pull request with the XSHTD file at the original project site.

The standard highlighting in AvalonEdit is dependent on the currently viewed type of text (eg C# or SQL) but a highlighting definition designed for a Light WPF theme may look ugly if viewed with a Dark WPF theme, and vice versa. This is why the ThemedHighlightingManager extension associates each highlighting definition with:

• A type of text (C#, SQL etc) and
• A WPF Theme (Light, Dark)

This approach is very similar to the implementation in Notepad++ except Notepad++ uses a plain xml file to configure a theme whereas the ThemedHighlightingManager uses an XSHTD file to do the same. But at the end of the day its XML in both cases and cloning a highlighting theme from Notepad++ is almost too easy (thats how similar both implementations are).

Assuming that you already use a WPF theming library, such as:

• MahApps.Metro,
• MLib, or
• MUI

enables an applications author to switch highlighting definitions to a matching color palette whenever the user switches a given WPF theme. See AvalonEditHighlightingThemes and Aehnlich for sample implementations.