MAGMA Syntax Highlighting

This blog post points out how to add syntax highlighting for MAGMA in gedit.

MAGMA is a very good computer algebra system, but not very well known outside a select mathematical circle. So it is not very surprising that gedit does not know how to syntax highlight MAGMA code out of the box.

Gedit uses GtkSourceView as its syntax highlighting engine. GtkSourceView can be extended by providing a language definition file.

So I set out to create a language definition file for MAGMA. The results can be found at github. In order to use is, you have to place the magma.lang file in the following directory:

~/.local/share/gtksourceview-2.0/language-specs

Below you can find a screenshot of a snippet of MAGMA code highlighted by gedit.