Provide an API for advanced/semantic source highlighting

[seanmcbreen]

From @Wosi on October 13, 2015 14:22

I'm looking for a way to implement an advanced source highlighting
where a language service changes the color of words in a file. The result would look similar to the output Visual Studio creates in C# files.
The screenshot shows C# code in Visual Studio. The word "Customer" is highlighted differently based on its context:

To implement highlighting like this it's necassary to let a language service decide about the color of a word after the grammar based highlighter has done its job.
I would like to see an API for this in the future.

Copied from original issue: Microsoft/vscode-extensionbuilders#14

[seanmcbreen]

From @egamma on October 13, 2015 14:40

The request makes sense OmniSharp supports semantic coloring and we currently have no API to expose this support.

[seanmcbreen]

From @Krzysztof-Cieslak on October 13, 2015 14:43

👍 Same can be used for F# - Visual F# Power Tools for VS and F# support in Xamarin Studio are both using semantic highlighting.

[jrieken]

We are close but we are missing meta-colours ala the-color-of-a-keyword

[Krzysztof-Cieslak]

Any progress with it? :)

[vilicvane]

Desperately want to know whether there've been any progress on this.

[NPatch]

Me2. Could you or will you expose it as json settings kinda like settings.json or keybindings.json?

[DustinCampbell]

Would love to see this happen. Honestly, it'd be great to have a way to provide colorization without a textmate grammar. The C# extension has incredibly accurate colorization information already available to it in OmniSharp (using the same Roslyn APIs that are used to colorize VS).