Changing the color of delimited text

Question

I am editing text of the form

first line
second line
\note{
first line
second line
}

I have to leave intact the text that's delimited by curly brackets and edit the text that's not delimited. But I keep making mistakes and editing the delimited text and leaving intact the text I meant to edit. A way to fix this would be to some how color everything that's contained in \note{ } Is there a way to do something like this?

Answer 1

This is not too complicated. Try this:

syn match delimited /\\note{\_.\{-}}/ containedin=ALL
hi delimited guifg=red ctermfg=red

Of course, you can change red to whatever color you want.

Note that this does what you asked for, but it might also do much more than what you asked for because you didn't provide a lot of detail about what exactly you want to highlight. For example, look at how this is highlighted:

Is this what you want? Will you have to handle nested brackets? What about when \note doesn't come at the beginning of the line? What about when the closing } isn't by itself?

You can refine this regex to do exactly what you want. For example,

/^\\note{\_.\{-}}$/

will only match if the line starts with \note and then the later line ends with }.