How to highlight my own syntax in Emacs?

Question

I am developing my own Domain Specific Language (DSL) and the filename extension is .xyz.

Emacs doesn't know how to highlight syntax in .xyz files so I uausally turn on typescript-mode or json-mode. But the available syntax highlight mode is not good enough for me, so I am considering writing my own syntax highligher for Emacs editor. Any tips on this task? Any toolkit recommendation?

Alternatively, I would be happy with any available mode that highlights common keywords such as class, string, list, variables before =sign and after @ sign, braces {}, brackets [], question mark ? and exclamation mark !. Any existing languages have similar syntax?

I am not color-blind and not picky on colors. Any syntax highligher that highlights above syntax can solve my problem.

Answer 1

If you are satisfied with simple syntax highlighting for keywords and comments only, there is a helper for this called define-generic-mode, which is documented in the elisp manual.

Some examples of using it can be found in generic-x.el distributed with Emacs.

But highlighting of variable names is not covered by this. For that, you need to be able to parse the DSL using semantic/bovine, as whether a particular string is interpreted as a variable name depends on context, and not just simple regexp matching.