[FR] Linux config files predefined filetypes

[kuvaldini]

Description

Many Linux config files in /usr/share/ /etc/ ~/.config/ ~/.* ~/.local/share, etc. have extensions (usually .conf) do not correspond to actual content.

for example my ~/.config/micro/settings.json

{
   "/etc/default/grub": {
      "filetype": "bash"
   },
   "/etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf": {
      "filetype": "toml"
   },
   "*.conf": {
      "filetype": "toml"
   },
   "**/avahi/*.service": {
      "filetype": "xml"
   },
   "*.hook":{
      "filetype":"toml"
   },
   "/usr/share/dbus-1/*.conf":{
      "filetype":"xml"
   }
}

and this is far to be complete. Let's add some config-filetypes.json to all-users config for micro. I am pretty sure somebody have better more full list.

[Andriamanitra]

config-filetypes.json would be redundant because we already have a filetype detection feature built into syntax files. For example ruby.yaml already includes detection for bunch of configuration files that use a DSL based on Ruby; we could do similar for others like toml and xml.

[JoeKar]

An when it comes to *.conf we have discussions like #2179 & #4004, because it can reflect various formats.
We like to stick to the current approach how we identify file types.
I agree that there is a lot of room for further improvements.

[kuvaldini]

ususally *.conf are ini or toml
some could be json some xml, or hjson
vscode is cool, it has interesting everistics, no need to explicitly set filetype it is detected from contents

[JoeKar]

vscode is cool, it has interesting everistics, no need to explicitly set filetype it is detected from contents

micro is cool as well, because it can do something similar in case multiple filetypes match¹²:

In addition, a signature can be provided to help resolving ambiguities when multiple matching filetypes are detected.

Finally, in addition to filename and/or header (but not instead of them) you may also provide an optional signature regex which is useful for resolving ambiguities when there are multiple syntax files matching the same file with different filetypes. If a signature regex is given, micro will match a certain amount of first lines in the file (this amount is determined by the detectlimit option) against this regex, and if any of the lines match, this syntax file's filetype will be preferred over other matching filetypes.

Footnotes

1. https://github.com/micro-editor/micro/tree/master/runtime/syntax#syntax-files ↩

2. https://github.com/micro-editor/micro/blob/master/runtime/help/colors.md#detect-definition ↩