vscode: Bad Syntax highlighting for BASH scripts

@variabl3 thats actually an issue I wasn’t aware of. It was caused by the % sign at the front of an argument, thinking it was special (similar to a $). I pushed a fix just now, v1.5.4 of Better Shell Syntax. It actually corrected highlighting in some other test cases as well

Thanks @jeff-hykin for the explanation.

Getting my personal system working really was the point of the comment

I didn’t know that the BASH grammar was maintained by outsiders in their spare time (like you).

Have a nice day, and thanks again for your work.

Given that most of the issues in this thread have been addressed upstream and pulled into VS Code insiders (and that we’re starting our endgame next week). I’m going to close this issue and we can open new ones for individual issues as they arise.

@jeff-hykin Coming back late here, but I do see 1.6.1 in the VS Code extensions. Installing now… Boom! That’s beautiful my friend. This looks better than ever and the issue above is resolved.

By the way… I did not realize MS is using your model either! Thank you so much, Jeff! I write a ton of BASH for some very large projects and it’s nice to meet the person behind this. 😃 Cheers!

Encountered this as well when revising a script which hasn’t been edited since 2021. Wrote a quick “dummy” demonstration to demonstrate:

As you can see, line 4 where I removed the percent sign does not break highlighting, however line 10 which is left intact does indeed break it. Per the comments, line 4 is NOT functional and line 10 is functional.

, jeff-hykin know about it already.

@yunielrc I see, I suppose getting your personal system working wasn’t the point of the comment

I’m almost sure that if this problem was with C#, TS, or other MS languages this wouldn’t happen, But unfortunately it’s BASH, the most used scripting language on linux, and obviously it is seen that it is not a priority for MS.

Yeah, for full explanation the difference is the repos of the Typescript grammar and C# grammar are owned/maintained by MS, while most grammar repos are maintained/unmaintained by random people like me in our free time. For whatever reason MS doesn’t do any PR’s for the ones they don’t keep directly. When something goes wrong for a MS grammar, someone on the payroll is responsible for causing it and fixing it.

Languages “important” to MS, like C++, still have these kind of breakages though. I know because I also maintain the C++ syntax.

Thanks @alexdima ,

I’m looking at it right now.

Yeah if you could @akpircher that’d be helpful. Upstream is here: https://github.com/jeff-hykin/better-shell-syntax

@alexr00 would you like me to re-create my comment as an issue in the upstream repo?

@RedCMD

I would have expected ${...} be the same colour as ${1}

Oh I see now, yeah thats an issue with the ${1} part, it should have the punctuation.section.bracket.curly.variable on the {}'s. Also it looks like there’s just general problems with the tagging ($ tagged as a bracket) so I reworked it just now and published it as v1.5.0.

To everyone in this thread:

Thank you for your patience and bug reports! The reason for the increased number of issues in shell script syntax highlighting is that we’re switching to a new shell script grammar. The old one was no longer maintained, and the author of the new one has shown that they’re quick to respond to and fix grammar issues (they also maintain the C and C++ grammars). There’s always a little pain when we switch to a new grammar, but in the end we’ll get (and have already gotten) fixes for longstanding shell script syntax highlighting issues.

If you want to help out with this effort, please use the VS Code insiders build. I’m pulling in the upstream changes from https://github.com/jeff-hykin/better-shell-syntax as they come in so you’ll get fixes faster there. You’ll also help to catch new issues before they make it into the stable build.

Coming from the closed (older?!) duplicate #175837, and having tried the Insiders build as suggested, var highlighting has improved since v1.76.0, but:

• I’m still seeing differences for curly braces around vars inside vs outside of strings, and between curly brace highlighting for positional vs other vars.
• Unquoted command args are rendered in the same colour as quoted, which makes things more difficult to differentiate.
• There’s inconsistency in detecting unquoted args within case statements according to whether or not a command is negated.
• Code blocks in curly braces show as being unmatched when there is no finishing ;

#!/bin/zsh

ls -la | grep -q 'foobar'

case "${1}" in
    0)  ls -la
        ;;
    1)  ! ls -la
        ;;
    *)  printf -- "arg must be one of: '1', '0'\n"
        exit 1
        ;;
esac

echo "${1}"
echo "${2:-${1}}"
echo "${foo:-${bar}}"
echo ${1}
echo ${2:-${1}}
echo ${foo:-${bar}}

{ echo 1 ; echo 2 }

1.75.1:

1.76.0:

1.77.0-insider:

@yunielrc, thank you for the screenshots and the sample. I tried it out, and it looks like it’s fixed in VS Code Insiders, where we’ve updated the shell script grammar already.

@ryapric would you be able to try out VS Code insiders and confirm whether the behavior is correct there for your file?

@karabaja4, your issue appears to be mostly related to using ( ) instead of { } for code blocks (ex. on line 16 and 18 of https://github.com/karabaja4/arch/blob/master/scripts/dns.sh). This is not fixed in VS Code Insiders. Opened upstream issue: https://github.com/jeff-hykin/better-shell-syntax/issues/49