Gedit: Add New Highlight Mode for .htaccess

Highlight modes are dependent on the file types you are editing. They are useful because they highlight different types of text into different colours. For example it is useful to put all comments into a specific colour. Important language specific keywords can be highlighted in a different colour. Usability wise your brain will then be able to ignore unimportant text and concentrate on important text, simply by colour.

I work a lot with .htaccess files in Ubuntu 16.04, so wanted a highlight mode for .htaccess. Someone has created one and was available for download, called apache.lang. Unfortunately I could not find out how to put this download into the right directory. Here are my instructions.

You will need to work in terminal. Ubuntu 16.04’s files manager, Files, does not show you the system files.

1. Download the highlight mode from gnome.org
2. Start up terminal, change dirctory to your Downloads directory. Note the capital “D”, or you’ll get an error. Find your file with the “ls” command. My file is
   

   cd Downloads
   ls a*

   You should see your file. In my case I did see apache.lang

3. Copy (cp command) the .lang file to the right directory for Gedit, /usr/share/gtksourceview-3.0/language-specs/ You will need “sudo” in order to get root access.
   

   sudo cp apache.lang /usr/share/gtksourceview-3.0/language-specs/apache.lang

4. Close and reopen Gedit. Now when you edit a .htaccess file the highlighting should show up.

Gedit adding highlight mode for .htaccess: rewrite commands.

Gedit adding highlight mode for .htaccess: user agent bans.

Gedit adding highlight mode for .htaccess: IP bans.

Overall the new highlight mode is a lot easier to read than plain text. In Gedit to change the highlight mode: view > Highlight Mode

Addendum: 2017-feb-28 : Added Twig.lang to gedit
Starting to get into Twig for Drupal 8 development, so found a Twig plugin for Gedit by gabrielcorpse. Had a hard time finding the proper directory for the lang files, as they are hidden. Tried to copy the twig.lang into the gtksourceview-3.0 dir, but it needs sudo, so did it in terminal

sudo cp twig.lang /usr/share/gtksourceview-3.0/language-specs/twig.lang

Tested it with this twig snippet:

Gedit Twig example with Twig plugin. Photo by Don Tai

It seems to work!

Addendum: 2017-aug-13 : Added openSCAD’s lang file to gedit

As I have started doing 3D printing, I needed a design program such as openSCAD. Andrew James Turner had written the lang file for gedit, so I added it. From root:

$ git clone https://github.com/AndrewJamesTurner/openSCAD-lang-file.git
$ cd openSCAD-lang-file
$ sudo cp twig.lang /usr/share/gtksourceview-3.0/language-specs/scad.lang

Open gedit, edit a scad file and the scad syntax will highlight.