What's the purpose of specifically coloring %s*([_%w]+:) in Python?

[Jint-lzxy]

Forgive me for this silly question, but I've just started learning a bit of Python for configuring Kitty and have almost zero prior knowledge of this language 😢 I noticed that in our config, we have this pattern %s*([_%w]+:), which expands to:

<1> space characters (0 or more repetitions)
<2> alphanumeric characters or underscores (1 or more repetitions)
<3> literal `:`

which, in my file, highlights statements such as else:. My question is, what's the purpose of specifically highlighting those statements? I've checked #514 and googled it, but can't seem to find a good explanation for this (or maybe I just didn't understand enough and missed something lol)

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@CharlesChiuGit I saw you attributed those changes. Could you please kindly give me some hints about what this pattern is useful for? Thanks a ton lmao

[CharlesChiuGit]

Sorry for the late reply! kinda busy on the weekend.

it's indeed a side effect of setting %s*([_%w]+:) for python in paint.nvim.
the reason of adding paint.nvim:

The reason I implemented this is because of the slow performance of tree-sitter-comment in large files. Treesitter will inject the comment language for every line comment, which is far from ideal. I've disabled the comment parser, but still wanted to see @something highlighted in Lua comments.¹

and paint.nvim just grep text pattern instead of using ts-comment to detect comments.

In python, we sometime wrote docstrings like so:

def SetDeviceIndex(self, index: int) -> None:
    """
    Set index for device
    
    Parameters:                                             <- notice this line
        index (int): Index of device.
    """
    foo(index)

and a screenshot of it:

as u can see Parameters: in the docstrings does share the same pattern with else:, index: and None:. (quite some false positives lol)
but I thought this won't do much harm, so i kept that this way.

Footnotes

1. https://github.com/folke/paint.nvim#-why ↩

[Jint-lzxy]

lol thanks for clarifying that! Looks like there's still a lot of stuff I need to grasp on my Python learning journey 😅

[CharlesChiuGit]

Or maybe u can have better ideas to eliminate those false positives!
You always pop up some super great ideas! 🫡

[Jint-lzxy]

Or maybe u can have better ideas to eliminate those false positives!

lmao I might be able to come up with something brilliant once I reach ur level of proficiency :D Can't even compile a list of possible false-positives atm lol