How to implement "highlight matching brackets" for your custom editor in Eclipse

For our VHDL editor view I wanted to implement highlight matching bracket like it exists in JDT. I had to dig a lot longer in the JDT code than anticipated to find out how JDT implements this functionality. As so often is the case in Eclipse development, in the end this turned out to be really easy. It was again a matter of finding with few lines to add…

The key is to override the configureSourceViewerDecorationSupport method from AbstractDecoratedTextEditor in your editor class and call the setMatchingCharacterPainterPreferenceKeys method. Note that the method name contains character and not bracket, which explains why I had to look so hard to find it.

public final static String EDITOR_MATCHING_BRACKETS = "matchingBrackets";
public final static String EDITOR_MATCHING_BRACKETS_COLOR= "matchingBracketsColor";

@Override
protected void configureSourceViewerDecorationSupport (SourceViewerDecorationSupport support) {
	super.configureSourceViewerDecorationSupport(support);		
	
	char[] matchChars = {'(', ')', '[', ']'}; //which brackets to match		
	ICharacterPairMatcher matcher = new DefaultCharacterPairMatcher(matchChars ,
			IDocumentExtension3.DEFAULT_PARTITIONING);
	support.setCharacterPairMatcher(matcher);
	support.setMatchingCharacterPainterPreferenceKeys(EDITOR_MATCHING_BRACKETS,EDITOR_MATCHING_BRACKETS_COLOR);
	
	//Enable bracket highlighting in the preference store
	IPreferenceStore store = getPreferenceStore();
	store.setDefault(EDITOR_MATCHING_BRACKETS, true);
	store.setDefault(EDITOR_MATCHING_BRACKETS_COLOR, "128,128,128");
}

Bracket highlighting is configured by two preference keys in a key store: one for enablement and one for the color of the box around the matched bracket. In the above code fragment I forced matching bracket highlighting with store.setDefault(EDITOR_MATCHING_BRACKETS, true); in neutral gray (store.setDefault(EDITOR_MATCHING_BRACKETS_COLOR, "128,128,128");).

I hope this can save you some time, Hendrik.