Please support semantic highlighting for Doxygen comments

[anatolyburakov]

Type: LanguageService

By convention, Doxygen comments use special comment signature to indicate Doxygen comment blocks. IDE's like Qt Creator support these and both colorizes Doxygen comments in different color and provides additional syntax colorization for values in the comment:

This makes it very easy to distinguish normal comments from documentation, and is very easy to spot when you've accidentally created the wrong comment type. It would be good if VSCode supported that as well (generating these from function signature automatically would also be a bonus!).

This is similar to #658, but at issue here is not display of comments, but rather syntax highlighting and colorization for C/C++ Doxygen comments.

[HunterZ]

Note that a triple-slash /// before each line is also commonly used to signal Doxygen comments.

[matter123]

@anatolyburakov @HunterZ I'm working on Doxygen comment syntax highlighting from the textmate grammar (non-semantic) side. Are you looking for something more comprehensive than the picture in the linked PR. jeff-hykin/better-cpp-syntax#354 (comment). Supports both /** and /// style documentation comments.

[anatolyburakov]

@matter123 yes it looks great. as long as it's possible to have it as a different color than normal comments, and have even rudimentary syntax highlighting within comments, i'll be quite happy!

[matter123]

@anatolyburakov @HunterZ with version v1.14.0 of the "Better C++ Syntax" extension, syntax highlighting for Doxygen commands inside documentation comments.

@anatolyburakov You can distinguish documentation comments from normal comments, as documentation comments have the scope comment.block.documentation.cpp. Using the vscode setting "editor.tokenColorCustomizations" you can apply a separate color to those comments

Example: (settings.json)

{
//...
"editor.tokenColorCustomizations": {
  "textmateRules": [
    {
      "name": "doxygen",
      "scope": [ "source.cpp comment.block.documentation" ],
      "settings": {
        "foreground": "#BBBBBB",
      }
    }
  ]
},
//...
}

[sean-mcmanus]

Thanks. Sounds like we can close this issue.

[gb-esat]

Would it be possible to support variable highlighting for @param[in,out]? Thanks!

http://www.doxygen.nl/manual/commands.html#cmdparam

[matter123]

@gb-esat Created jeff-hykin/better-cpp-syntax#418 for that