Vim syntax highlighting for custom C types

Question

I want to use syntax highlighting for custom C types. Based on my coding convention, types can occur in the following places:

typedef type1 type2;

(static | extern | register | volatile)? type ...;

(struct | enum | union) type ...;

func(type1 x, type2 x, ...);  // might be a harder case

It doesn't include all the situations, but can already cover probably more than 90% of the usage. It seems to me like just a simple pattern matching problem, but I was a bit frustrated playing with vim syntax script, and couldn't get what I need. For example, I don't know how to match part of the pattern without highlighting the rest. Any ideas how to do it?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The way built-in types are declared is very simple. From /usr/share/vim/vim74/syntax/c.vim:

syn keyword     cType           int long short char void
syn keyword     cType           signed unsigned float double
" [..etc..]

And then later on it sets a highlight group:

hi def link cType               Type

Adding to this syntax group is easy:

:syn keyword cType type1

Or is you want a different highlight group, use something like:

:syn keyword cTypeCustom type1
:hi def link cTypeCustom MyType
:hi MyType ctermfg=darkblue guifg=darkblue

---

The trick here is to let Vim know which custom types are yours. You could "regex it", but it seems to me that a far better and more robust solution would be to actually parse the C files and generate this information. It should be fairly easy to get this information with clang (this tutorial) might help), you could then make this program write to ~/.vim/after/syntax/c.vim.