Ability to highlight text by pattern

[failable]

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Describe the feature

Can be helpful for reading codes. Don't necessary to be semantic.

If applicable, add mockups / screenshots to help present your vision of the feature

[JosephTLyons]

Hey @liebkne, can you explain this a bit more? Is the regex and color stored in some settings file?

[failable]

@JosephTLyons

Hi, the regex or the pattern is interactively input by user, thought one should be also highlight symbol under cursor without inputing regex.

The colors might be built-in or configurable. When highlighting, colors might be selectable or automatically selected.

I think It may be possible to just re-use the current search interface by adding a "Highlight matches", or use other interaction.

Below is several demos:

• Highlight current symbol under cursor (Don't need to select colors, trigger by a shortcut simply)

  under_cursor.mov

• Highlight by regex and manually select a color (by calling command or shortcut)

  regex.mov

• Select a region then highlight (by shortcut)

  region.mov

Note that highlighting does not necessary mean selecting. But it will be helpful to have the ability turn highlights into selections like

mc.mov

[JosephTLyons]

Ok, that all makes sense now. Appreciate the super thorough reply @liebkne!

[notpeter]

We recently shipped:

• editor: Highlight all matching occurrences of text in selection #24835

Which supports the simplest use case of this, since selection_highlight is by default set to true, when you select there will be a dim selection of all matches.

The emacs version seems more advanced, supporting regular expressions and other features.
Could you take a moment and enumerate (in words) the various ways you one can interact with the emacs feature. Currently this feels really big, but I think it might be possible to scope something more reasonable.

[failable]

Could you take a moment and enumerate (in words) the various ways you one can interact with the emacs feature.

Hello, does this comment helps?

There are several basic cases:

• Highlight current symbol under cursor (Don't need to select colors, trigger by a shortcut simply). This is similar to the PR you linked but even the cursor is moved the highlight is persistent until one calls the unhighlight command.
• Highlight by regex and manually select a color (by calling command or shortcut).
• Select a region then highlight (by shortcut)
• Note that highlighting does not necessary mean selecting. But it will be helpful to have the ability turn highlights into selections.

For me, highlights are particular helpful when reading codes for tracking variables.