Highlighting that keeps up with your typing

Syntax highlighting looks simple until you type in the middle of a large file. Re-coloring a whole document on every keystroke is wasted work, and editors that do it eventually show you the seams: colors that flicker, or trail a few characters behind the cursor.

Codeworks highlights incrementally. When the buffer changes, the parser reuses everything it already knows about the file and re-examines only the region your edit touched. The editor then applies tokens for that edit, not for the whole document. That is the loop the code panel on our homepage sketches.

What you notice is mostly what you stop noticing. Colors are simply correct as you type, in small scripts and in long files alike, because the work done per keystroke is proportional to the edit, not to the file.

Grammar coverage spans the languages you would expect from a general-purpose editor, and language intelligence beyond coloring comes from language servers, which deserve their own post.