How to create an Eclipse editor plugin with syntax checking and coloring as fast as possible?

I'm working on a project that requires me to create a series of editors for lang开发者_如何学Cuages that are quite different. The syntaxes are defined by us.

I'm looking for a solution for this. Is there a shortcut to take in this problem?

You could use XText:

a framework for development of textual domain specific languages (DSLs).
Just describe your very own DSL using Xtext's simple EBNF grammar language and the generator will create a parser, an AST-meta model (implemented in EMF) as well as a full-featured Eclipse text editor from that.

Alternatives to XText are Rascal or Spoofax, both less popular than XText but interesting for they support more general context-free grammars, among other things. Nice to check out.

If you are looking for a more low level, programmable solution, then Eclipse's IDE Meta-tooling platform is a good choice (IMP).

What IMP gives you is API to connect your existing parsers to Eclipse without much hassle. You need to implement an IParseController interface, to call your parser and ITokenIterator to produce tokens and some other interface to assign fonts to each kind of token.

The aforementioned Rascal and Spoofax are both build on top of IMP.

Not mentioned is DLTK (proposed also in Tutorial regarding the development of a custom Eclipse editor)

There are Ruby, bash that are implemented with it.