Pygments syntax highlighting

A minimal QMainWindow with a ScintillaEdit central widget, showing Python syntax highlighting driven by Pygments. pyside6-scintilla doesn't wrap a lexer binding, so there's no SCI_SETLEXER to flip on. Instead, pygments_highlighter.py tokenizes the editor's text with Pygments' lexer/token API and applies the resulting styles manually via ScintillaEdit's raw SCI_STYLE* messages (styleSetFore(), startStyling(), setStyling(), ...), re-running on every edit via the editor's modified signal.

pygments_highlighter.py has no dependencies beyond pyside6-scintilla and pygments — copy it straight into your own project, same as bscintillaedit.py. main.py itself stays a thin PySide6 app shell.

PygmentsHighlighter.rehighlight() re-tokenizes the whole buffer on every edit, which is fine at example/small-file scale but won't scale to large files — a production version would restyle only the changed region instead.

Note

A PygmentsHighlighter instance is bound 1:1 to one ScintillaEdit at construction — it can't highlight multiple widgets by itself. To highlight several editors, create one instance per widget:

highlighter_a = PygmentsHighlighter(editor_a, PythonLexer())
highlighter_b = PygmentsHighlighter(editor_b, PythonLexer())

This also matches how Qt's own QSyntaxHighlighter attaches to one QTextDocument at a time. Note that styling is per-view, not per-document — even if two editors share an underlying document via setDocPointer(), each still needs its own highlighter.

PygmentsHighlighter is a QObject. Pass a parent (e.g. the window that owns the editor, as main.py does) to tie its lifetime to that object instead of keeping an explicit reference around:

PygmentsHighlighter(editor, PythonLexer(), parent=window)

Running

From the repo root, after uv sync:

uv run python examples/highlighting/pygments_highlighting/main.py

Pygments is a dev-only dependency of this repo, used solely for this example — it is not a dependency of the pyside6-scintilla package itself.

Source

examples/highlighting/pygments_highlighting/

Screenshots