Sublime: Overriding default file type/Assigning specific files to a file type
I’ve been using Sublime a bit recently and one thing I wanted to do was put neo4j cypher queries into files with arbitrary extensions and have them recognised as cypher files every time I open them.
I’m using the cypher Sublime plugin to get the syntax highlighting but since I’ve got my cypher in a .haml file it only remembers that it should have cypher highlighting as long as the file is open.
As soon as I close and then re-open the file it goes back to being highlighted as HAML.
I initially thought that the way around this would be to write a plugin which kept track of files that you’d manually assigned a syntax to but then I came across the ApplySyntax plugin which seems even better.
ApplySyntax allows you to assign syntaxes to files based on regular expression matching on the file name or on the first line of the file.
At the moment, the easiest way to detect that a file is a cypher query is that the first line will begin with 'START' so I wrote the following in my user settings file:
~/Library/Application Support/Sublime Text 2/Packages/User/ApplySyntax.sublime-settings
{
"reraise_exceptions": false,
"new_file_syntax": false,
"syntaxes": [
{
"name": "Cypher",
"rules": [
{"first_line": "^START"}
]
}
]
}ApplySyntax is a pretty neat plugin, worth having a look if you have this problem to solve!
About the author
I'm currently working on short form content at ClickHouse. I publish short 5 minute videos showing how to solve data problems on YouTube @LearnDataWithMark. I previously worked on graph analytics at Neo4j, where I also co-authored the O'Reilly Graph Algorithms Book with Amy Hodler.