If you edit shader code in Visual Studio 2013, you might like to use NShader to get syntax highlighting. NShader was originally written by Alexandre Mutel. His version is available here but it only supports VS2008, VS2010, and VS2012. Issam Khalil had forked it and added VS2013 support, as well as Unity shader highlighting.
I’ve forked Issam’s code and added a couple of features. The installer for the extension can be downloaded here. This installer can be used to install into both Visual Studio 2013 and 2015.
You can now override the file type detection by specifying, on the first line of a shader file, a comment like so:
// shadertype=<type>
where <type> is one of:
hlsl
glsl
cg
unity
This will force the file to use the specified syntax highlighter. This is case sensitive and must appear exactly as above. Otherwise if the shadertype tag is not present, the file extension will be used to decide what type of highlighting to use. The following extensions are recognised:
HLSL syntax highlighter – .fx, .fxh, .hlsl, .vsh, .psh, .fsh
GLSL syntax highlighter – .glsl, .frag, .vert, .fp, .vp, .geom, .xsh
CG syntax highlighter – .cg, .cgfx
Unity syntax highlighter – .shader, .cginc, .compute
The keyword mapping files that can be placed in %APPDATA%\NShader now override the built-in mappings. For example, if float is mapped as a keyword in the built-in mapping for GLSL, it can be changed to a type by adding the following line to %APPDATA%\NShader\GLSLKeywords.map:
TYPE=float
Multiple words can be specified on a single line by separating them with spaces or tabs. The zip file contains the built-in keyword mapping files as examples.
I’ve also added a separate colour setting for anything that is defined as a type. This should appear in Tools > Options > Environment > Fonts and Colors in the display items list for the text editor colours. Scroll down to ‘n’ and you should see all the NShader colour settings. The new setting is ‘NShader – Type’.
If you are having troubles with files not highlighting, try uninstalling NShader first via Tools > Extensions and Updates. Also make sure you restart Visual Studio after installing NShader!
This is awesome. Thanks!
Thanks!
Great tool!
Is it possible to make the extension highlight .comp files as well (Compute Shader for GLSL)?
I tried adding the the following line at the top on a .comp file:
// shadertype=
But it didn’t hilghlight anything. All my .geom, .vert and .frag files work perfectly though.
I’m using Visual Studio 2015 Community.
The shadertype didn’t make it into the comment because of the brackets. But I wrote glsl as shadertype.
Yeah unfortunately it only parses specific files (those with extensions mentioned in the post). I’ll update it to add the .comp extension, and see if I can find a way to dynamically add extensions somehow (maybe in the VS options).
Ok I’ve updated the two zip files. Let me know if that works. Actually I think you can use the 2015 version to install in 2013 as well but I haven’t fully tested that, so I updated both.
Thank you very much. This works perfectly now.
I thought this might be of interest to you. It’s not a standard for naming GLSL shaders yet, but perhaps this is the closest thing we got.
Thanks again.
Good find, thanks!
Woop! Thanks!!
Thank you very much.
Is it possible to customize the color used ? I’m not very fan of the current ones.
Anyway very good job
Yep! You should be able to change the colours in Tools > Options > Fonts and Colors. Make sure you have “Text Editor” selected in “Show settings for:”. The NShader colours all start with “NShader” so just scroll down to ‘N’ in the list.
If it doesn’t show up in there, try running devenv /setup. There seems to be a common problem of items not showing up in there with other plugins. If devenv /setup doesn’t work, try this suggestion for ReSharper; it might also work for NShader.
Thanks for the vs2015 one, just started to try vs2015 com version few days ago. And, I just modified the GLSLKeywords.map into glsl 4.5 core, I think this might be useful for someone, here it is on my google drive:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6BB-nCRQ7RnOV80TVFTVElIbjA/view?usp=sharing
Thanks for that, I’ll add that to the build!
Hi,
I’m trying to install this extension from your link (for VS 2013 Ultimate), but received such error:
“The extension: ‘NSShader’ requires administrative privilages in order to be uninstalled.”. Yes, I get it while instalation. I tried to change privilages for this package, also for VS, but without any results. Do you know how to handle this?
Thanks,
Lukas
Hm it sounds like you have a version of NSShader installed already and it’s trying to uninstall it. You could try running the installer as admin (right-click on it, select “run as admin”) or uninstall it yourself within Visual Studio (but you’ll have to run VS as admin I think – again, right-click and select “run as admin”).
thanks for the extension to NShader, works great!
i was wondering if you could add highlighting to semantics. even if its just a color entry that we could map to, that would be very helpful
It should be possible. I don’t have time at the moment but I’ll look into it.
Awesome, works great for vs2015!
Thanks!
I knew about NShader but i didn’t know someone forked it and added VS2013 support
Works perfectly. You’re awesome!
When installing it in msvc 2013 error is showing “the extension is already installed to all applicable products” how o fix it?
Are you sure you don’t already have it or an older version installed? Check in the extension manager (Tools->Extension Manager) and uninstall any NShader you see in there, and then close VS.
It is there but I can not uninsall it. After I click unistall and restart VC it is still there. Is there any way to remove it manually?
I’m not sure sorry. It probably lives somewhere in %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\xx\Extensions where xx is the Visual Studio version. I reckon try uninstalling it, shut down VS, then find the extension directory and delete it. There might be some registry settings too, but hopefully deleting the files and restarting will force it to clean that up.
It can not force the file to use the specified syntax highlighter when I add the comment // shadertype=
Here is my file named “my.tesc”
//shadertype=glsl
#version 440
layout (vertices = 3) out;
in vec4 tessPosition_CS_in[];
in vec4 tessColor_CS_in[];
out vec4 tessPosition_ES_in[];
out vec4 tessColor_ES_in[];
void main(void)
{
tessPosition_ES_in[gl_InvocationID] = tessPosition_CS_in[gl_InvocationID];
tessColor_ES_in[gl_InvocationID] = tessColor_CS_in[gl_InvocationID];
gl_TessLevelInner[0] = 1.0;
gl_TessLevelOuter[0] = 2.0;
gl_TessLevelOuter[1] = 5.0;
gl_TessLevelOuter[2] = 5.0;
}
The shadertype should be specified as “// shadertype=“, i.e. with a space after the opening comment. It looks like you don’t have a space after the opening comment, so try adding one and see if that fixes it.
I just realised your file has an extension of .tesc which means NShader won’t be running on it. The ‘shadertype’ override only works if NShader already recognises the file from its extension. So that explains why it’s not working for you. I’m not sure how to make it work on arbitrary files, because Visual Studio requires you to register the plugin for specific file extensions. I’ll have a think about it.
I would prefer it if the numbers wouldn’t have a light blue syntax highlighting. It is way too bright. Something like purple would be better
You can change the colours of numbers yourself in Tools > Options > Environment > Fonts and Colors!
Hey, I was wondering if there was a way for me to specify more extensions for shader files. I tried to add the type comment at the top of my file but it didn’t work. This would be helpful for tessellation shaders… Perhaps these a properties file i could manually edit and add the extensions in..?
Thx.
Unfortunately not without building the extension yourself at the moment. VS requires the plugin to register itself for specific file extensions. I’m not sure how to make it dynamic; I’ll have a think about it and dig through the VS extension system!
Hi,Sam. So… Could you add a “.usf” file extension as HLSL file type? This is the shader file type of Unreal Engine 4. Its syntax is the same as HLSL, so I can use NShader for syntax hightlighting. When I modify the “.usf” to “.hlsl”, it works good with NShader. Please add this extension into NShader. Thank you in advance!
Yep I’ll do that tomorrow!
Oh well, that’s too bad. One thing you could do is add these file extensions in https://www.khronos.org/opengles/sdk/tools/Reference-Compiler/ (as suggested somewhere above), I find that they are somewhat of a standard and would at least provide coloring for tessellation shaders. Thanks for the great plugin!
For anyone following this who wanted to be able to dynamically add file extensions – I’ve updated the build to allow for this! See here http://www.horsedrawngames.com/shader-syntax-highlighting/
I just begin learning about shaders in Unity, and this is awesome. Thank you!
Is it possible to add brace match highlighting?
This could certainly be added, but I’m not sure I have the time. You should check out HLSL Tools from Tim Jones: http://timjones.tw/blog/archive/2015/10/06/introducing-hlsl-tools-for-visual-studio. He has brace matching and pretty much the same feature set as NShader.
You saved my life. Thanks!
Awesome work! Thank you so much!
Awesome! Thanks so much.
Thank you very much. Exactly what i was searching for.
Awesome! Thanks
Really usefull, thanks a lot !
Guys, if you want to support custom extensions, you can manually edit the .vsix file.
The .vsix file is just a zip. So I unzipped it, looked for the syntax highlighting i wanted (.glsl).
It appears in two places.
Copy all the relevant lines for the first occurence from glsl and just past them below it, and change the extension i.e i pasted this to use “.vs” to get glsl highlighting:
“vs”=dword:00000020
“DisplayName”=”#115″
“Package”=”{dd9b8cde-96a0-4442-bf6f-083a7f43d453}”
[$RootKey$\Editors\{3224b0db-6280-470b-b57a-d6e31b8a5856}\Extensions]
Do the same for the next occurence, for example I copy pasted renamed this:
[$RootKey$\Languages\File Extensions\.vs]
@=”{e1e045da-7e8d-4da1-94cc-93e9a1c1e289}”
When done, right click on all the source files you unzipped and click add to archive, select ZIP format, and name extension .vsix and click compress.
Install the modifed extension and it works.
That’s great, thanks for the tip! I’m surprised it works but there you go!
This extension works in VS 2017 community?
It should work. If you have any problems feel free to log an issue on GitHub at https://github.com/samizzo/nshader.