---
title: Syntax Highlighting
description: Enabling conkyrc syntax highlighting
indexWeight: 0
---

## Gedit

Note: this highlights syntax only and does **NOT** attempt to validate
arguments or keywords. It is unlikely to be 100% accurate, and improvements are
welcome.

Syntax highlighting is automatically applied to files with `conky` in their
name, for example `my_config.conky`. Unfortunately, it also matches the
`conky.lang` file itself, which you should set to XML manually.

- [`gtksourceview` Syntax Highlight documentation][1]
- [Regex Tutorial](http://www.rexegg.com/)
- [Regex Testing](https://regex101.com/)

Developers: the main context (`id="conkyrc"`) is where gedit starts. That
context then references other subcontexts. Each context can apply styles to
itself, to substrings matched by its regular expressions, or to its contents in
the case of `<start><end>` container contexts. If anything is unclear, search
the [`gtksourceview` docs][1] for the relevant XML attributes. If you run into
a particularly complex regex, try the Regex Tester linked above, and keep in
mind that `gtksourceview` adds some extra regex syntax, such as `\%[ ... ]`
and `\%{ ... }`.

---

For medit v1.1.1:
`/usr/share/medit/language-specs/conky.lang`

For older versions of medit:
`/usr/share/medit-1/language-specs/conky.lang`

For gedit v2.x:
`/usr/share/gtksourceview-2.0/language-specs/conky.lang`
or, for a single user:
`~/.local/share/gtksourceview-2.0/language-specs/conky.lang`

For gedit v3.x:
`/usr/share/gtksourceview-3.0/language-specs/conky.lang`
or, for a single user:
`~/.local/share/gtksourceview-3.0/language-specs/conky.lang`

[1]: https://developer.gnome.org/gtksourceview/stable/lang-reference.html
