GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 644703
Highlight text between matching brackets
Last modified: 2016-08-11 06:22:24 UTC
As of now, when the cursor is near a bracket/brace/parenthesis, its corresponding closing/opening symbol gets highlighted (i.e.such an option exists). It is not very easy to spot it out though. So, I'd suggest highlighting the text enclosed between them to be highlighted in a different shade, as well. This would make reading the code much easier. Expected Result: When the cursor is next to a tag/bracket, the text region between that tag and its matching symbol should be highlighted in a different colour (say, sky blue when background is white). Actual Result: Only the matching bracket is highlighted.
I'd like to submit Doug McNutt's feature request on this thread, as well. "But I'd really like to have the entire text, including the parentheses, selected with a double click or other suitable gesture on a one of the block enclosing graphemes." The community can discuss over this and we can start working on it.
I can also go on to say that while work is being done on this, Code folding can be implemented at the same time, as well. Code Folding has been in gedit's Road Map for a while and all these features can be combined and implemented at the same time. I would like to take up the work of doing so, with a little help from the community too. In fact, I would also like to know if this would be a worthy idea for a GSoC project and whether I can propose this.
Well, one of the reasons this hasn't been implemented yet is because it is a tricky issue, we have some work done in relation to it but it is very complicated.
Bug #349060 is related, and might solve the problem in a better way.
Unlikely to be fixed.