Google Wave is still rough around the edges, but it has a lot of potential in terms of becoming a great collaboration tool. As a developer, your first question will probably be: “How do I add code highlighting to my waves?”. The answer is straightforward, however not very easy to find if you google it. I hope this post will help fellow developers who are experimenting with Google Wave.
The following steps are required to obtain syntax highlighting for your code:
- Create a new wave and add the Syntaxy robot to your wave. Use the wave address: kasyntaxy@appspot.com.
- Reply to your first message or within it, thereby creating a reply (called “blip” in Google lingo).
- Specify your code’s language, prefixing the name with a hash and exclamation mark, like #!python or #!ruby.
At this point, as you type the code in your blip it will be highlighted by the Syntaxy bot as shown in the picture below:
More advanced automatic syntax highlighting bots will probably appear as Google Wave progresses, but this one should do the trick for now. On a side note, if you copy and paste code from XCode, the code formatting will be kept in your waves and blips without the need for bots.
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Interesting, thanks, I’ll have to give it a try. Here’s a link to the Wave Sample Gallery page: http://wave-samples-gallery.appspot.com/about_app?app_id=14008 which also has a 1:46 video demonstration.
Can’t get it to do squat for me… Yet I find no evidence in searching the web that it’s completely broken, which leads me to believe either (a) something I’m doing wrong or (b) an incompatibility w/ Ubuntu Karmic and Firefox.
Does not work with C code! 🙁
the bot doesn’t work right now, it is over quota.
Wonderful Robot!
However, I would be nice if you could use a set of custom tags to highlight snippets of code within normal text:
#!perl start
code goes here
#!perl stop
And we have normal formatting here.