Can I incorporate XCode's text editor into my own program for text highlighting?

I'm trying to have a text box that has syntax highlighting. To avoid the hassel and rework of implementing my own highlighter, is it possible to incorporate and use XCode's editor? Similar to how QuickLoo开发者_开发百科k shows the contents of files.

You can't.

QuickLook asks a plugin how to render. Xcode's QuickLook plugin for source files uses Xcode's own library, which is not open source.

Here are a few open source initiatives that provide syntax highlighting in Cocoa.

Xcode 4 hilighting I think is now based on Clang, Clang/LLVM is a new compiler technology that has many goals that traditional compilers have not tried to achieve, the feature of use to you is the compiler is not a single monolithic compiler but instead a collection of libraries, you can pitch and choose which libraries you want to use, the one you would be interested in is libclang which takes c/c++.Objective-C source code and turns it into a symbolic tree, it then turn that into the llvm internal representation, you should be able to get the symbolic tree representation, which you can then use to hi-light source code. You can get more information about clang from here, one possible issue is that libclang may only be available on Macs with Xcode installed.