I'm trying to make a regex in emacs to font-lock tasks, projects and notes in taskpaper files.
Taskpaper is a simple text based format for task management, with the following format:
Project 1:
- Task 1
- Task 2
Note about Task2
Project 2:
- Task 3
Note about Task 3
A general note about something
I'm using a taskpaper mode I found here as a basis (https://github.com/jedthehumanoid/taskpaper.el/blob/master/taskpaper.el). However, this mode is based on space indentation, and it seems that at the moment, the taskpaper format uses tabs to indent.
(setq font-lock-defaults
'(("^.*@done.*$" . font-lock-comment-face)
("^.*:$" . font-lock-function-name-face)
("^[\t]*[^-\t].*[^:]$" font-lock-comment-face)
("@.*" . font-lock-variable-name-face)))
At the moment, the third regex (which should font-lock notes in the comment face) is not working, and I can't see why. Notes are all lines with any indentation that do not begin with a - and do not end with a :
The strange thing is, in the regex builder, the regex ^[\t]*[^-\t].*[^:]$ successfully matches the notes lines.
I've tried double escaping the \t characters (as \\t) as suggested in some other questions, but this appears to make no difference.
What makes the third rule different from the others is that the others use a dotted pair, i.e. (xxx . yyy) whereas the third use list notation, i.e. (xxx yyy).
The list notation can also be used, but then you must supply the subexpression to be highlighted, as in (regexp 0 font-lock-comment-face).