The Problem

Since I started this blog, I have always had the problem, that Jekyll uses Liquid as a templating engine.

First I had to write Rakefiles that would automatically compile my HAML files into HTML intermixed with Luquid, since I wanted to avoid having to write that dreaded HTML (is there actually anything worse? Besides XML I mean...). I'm gonna write on how I did that some time soon.

But then there was another problem:

Vim is of course not naturally guarded against Liquid within Markdown files, which I use to compose the entries of this blog. Nor against a YAML front matter.

So the syntax highlighting would get messed up frequently when I wanted to post code, which I would stash into

{% highlight ruby %}
...
{% endhighlight %}

tags to get the syntax highlighting of Jekyll.

(NOTE: Another nice problem I ran into is trying to get Liquid to output the liquid tags you see above. It's parser is very limited so it kept crashing whenever I put a } inside the tag. I ended up putting tag: {% into the front matter and replacing all occurrences of {% with {{ page.tag }}...)

The Solution

So today I told myself: That's enough! And here's the result.

It actually turned out to be quite an easy fix, mostly because of Vim's ingenious syntax highlighting system which is really easy to get used to (if you know your Vim regexps).

I just modified my ~/.vim/syntax/mkd.vim and added the following lines after all the syn region commands and before any HtmlHiLink commands:

syn region lqdHighlight     start=/^{%\s*highlight\(\s\+\w\+\)\{0,1}\s*%}$/ end=/{%\s*endhighlight\s*%}/ contains=@Spell
syn region jkyFrontMatter   start=/\%^---$/                                 end=/^---$/                  contains=@Spell
HtmlHiLink lqdHighlight     String
HtmlHiLink jkyFrontMatter   String

That takes care of all the highlighting tags and the YAML front matter.

(Note: the above listing was done the same way as the previous one. It actually took me a good half hour to figure out how to do this... My first approach was to just put it all into the frontmatter, but a current Jekyll bug prevents you from putting --- into the frontmatter...)