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Comment by archsurface | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that the caps were syntax highlighting on monochrome screens; no longer needed with colour. Can't provide a reference, it's an old memory.

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Most of the SQL I write is within a string of another programming language, so it's essentially monochrome unless there's some really fancy syntax highlighting going on.

Aside, but jetbrains IDEs seem to have some way to detect embedded sql and highlight it. I don’t remember configuring anything to get this feature.

More than highlight they'll do schema validation against inline SQL strings also.

VS Code does (did?) detect embedded SQL in PHP and correctly colour it, but only if it's on a single line. Any linebreaks and the colour is turned off. Also, if you're using prepared statements and have an @label, and that label is at the end of the string (so immediately followed by a closing quote), the SQL colouring continues into the rest of the PHP beyond the string. So it's important that single-line SQL statements ending in a @label be edited into multi-line statements to turn off the broken SQL colouring. Odd.

PHP strings tend to have better syntax highlighting with here/now docs (i.e. starting with `<<<TOKEN`). I've found SublimeText to have excellent SQL detection when using these tokens to delineate queries (and the syntax lends itself well to block strings anyways).

This is Jetbrain's "language injection" feature if you want to look it up. It works with any languages that the IDE supports, and like a sibling comment mentioned it does more than syntax highlighting.

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/using-language-injection...

If you're working with some established framework and project structure their IDEs pull that information out of that, otherwise you'll need to at least tell it the dialect, but if you e.g. configure the database as a data source in the IDE you'll get full schema xref.

Another aside: that is true for a huge range of programming languages as well as things like HTML. I believe it can automatically add \ to " in strings when those strings are marked to the IDE as HTML.

Vimers can adapt https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Different_syntax_highlighting_wi... for a similar thing (but you have to wrap a string into some regular syntax).

Same, I am a bit conflicted, I enjoy the sql and don't really like the ORM's but I hate seeing the big blocks of SQL in my code.

So I wrote a thing that lets me use sql text as a function, it is several sorts of terrible, in that way that you should never write clever code. but I am not really a programmer, most of my code is for myself. I keep using it more and more. I dread the day Someone else needs to look at my code.

http://nl1.outband.net/extra/query.txt

I find that in worst cases I can always copy and paste to a quick temporary buffer that is highlighted. I might be doing that naturally anyway if I'm trying to debug it, just to run it in a Data IDE of my choice, but sometimes even just using a scratch VS Code "Untitled" file can be useful (it's SQL auto-detect is usually good enough, but switching to SQL is easy enough if it doesn't auto-detect).

I think the "color is all we need" idea makes sense in proportion to how many of our tools actually support colorization.

E.g., the last time I used the psql program, I don't think it had colorization of the SQL, despite running in a color-capable terminal emulator.

It probably doesn't help that terminal colors are a bit of mess. E.g., piping colored output through 'less' can result in some messy control-character rendering rather than having the desired effect.

> piping colored output through 'less' can result in some messy control-character rendering rather than having the desired effect.

It can, but -G or -R can fix that.

Try pgcli for color and completion.

Good tip, thank you.

Like sigils in that regard. Perl-type sigils are extremely nice... if you're editing in Notepad or some ancient vi without syntax highlighting and the ability to ID references on request. Little point to them, if you've got more-capable tools.

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