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NCL: Editor enhancements for use with NCL scripts

This page contains some handy scripts for customizing various editors to do special highlighting of NCL syntax. They were documented and contributed by other users.

Note that the NCL developers have not tested every one of these scripts, so use these at your own discretion.

These editor scripts are not necessarily supported by the NCL team, but we greatly appreciate and encourage these kind of contributions.

These are listed alphabetically:

In order to help create your own editor enhancements, you can use the functions in gen_editor_utils.ncl to create lists of all the NCL functions/procedures, keywords, operators, and/or resource names. See the comments at the top.

If you have an editor enhancement contribution for NCL, send email to ncl-talk.

GNU Emacs

Functionality includes:

  • Indents two spaces between "begin" and "end" statments
  • Indents two spaces within "do" loops and "if" statments
  • Comment handling (M-;)
    • insert a comment at the end of the current line
    • Alternatively comment/uncomment selected region
  • Highlighting (chose your colors)

Issues that remain

  • Comment Handling does not work in xemacs
  • Comments may not fontify on file open in xemacs

Controlling your emacs window:
Add and modify the following to your .Xdefaults if desired:

    Emacs.geometry:         80x38+250+10
    Emacs*background:       antique white
    Emacs*foreground:       black
    Emacs.pane.menubar.background: peachpuff
    Emacs.menu*.background: peachpuff
    Emacs.cursorColor:      red3
    Emacs.font:             10x20
    Emacs.pane.menubar.font: 10x20
    

Steps

  • Download the ncl.el file and put it on your system.
  • Put the following text in your .emacs file: (note, if you do not like the specified colors, you can change them here or not include this portion in your .emacs file)
  •     (setq auto-mode-alist (cons '("\.ncl$" . ncl-mode) auto-mode-alist))
    
        ; this line associates ncl-mode with the lisp package that defines it.
        (autoload 'ncl-mode "~/bin/ncl.el")  
    
        ; a hook is a list of functions that get executed under certain 
        ; conditions. 
        (add-hook 'ncl-mode-hook
           (lambda ()  ; lambda is an anonymous function. e.g. has no name.
        ; highlight comments
            (set-face-foreground font-lock-comment-face "FireBrick")
        ; highlight strings
            (set-face-foreground font-lock-string-face "Salmon")
        ; highlight keywords, array descriptors, and tests
            (set-face-foreground font-lock-keyword-face "Purple")
        ; highlight built-in functions
            (set-face-foreground font-lock-builtin-face "Blue")
        ; highlight gsn* functions
            (set-face-foreground font-lock-variable-name-face "SteelBlue")
        ; highlight shea_util and contributed functions
            (set-face-foreground font-lock-function-name-face  "CadetBlue") 
        ; highlight resources        
            (set-face-foreground font-lock-constant-face  "ForestGreen")
             )
        )
        

  • Change ~/bin/ncl.el to the location of YOUR ncl.el file
  • Modify the ncl.el code as necessary to include functions or keywords not specifically listed

The Emacs NCL mode was first implemented by Sylvia Murphy at NCAR. Updates have been provided by Heiko Klein of Norway, Carl Schreck and Alan Srock of the University at Albany (SUNY), and Thierry Corti of ETH in Zurich, Switzerland.

NEdit

Various files for NEdit:

ncl.nedit / ncl2.nedit / ncl3.nedit

The following scripts enable NCL syntax highlighting in NEdit versions 5.1.0 and higher. The scripts range from a minimalistic approach with few highlighting schemes and few colors, to a more thorough highlighting scheme with many colors. The scripts can be downloaded and, if desired, edited and tested. When ready you can import the file into NEdit by typing, for example:

    nedit -import ncl.edit
You will only have to import the file once. Go to "Preferences" and click on "Save Defaults".
  • ncl.nedit -a minimalistic approach, keywords and flow constructs are in bold-black, comments are plain-red and symbols are highlighted in bold-blue (courtesy of Dennis Shea)

  • ncl2.nedit - a more moderate highlighting scheme that highlights attributes, I/O functions (among others) (courtesy of Adam Phillips)

  • ncl3.nedit - an intensive syntax highlighting approach that highlights most NCL functions (courtesy of Paul Thomas Quelet). Updated periodically by volunteers to reflect new syntax or functions.

vi/vim

Several people have included enhancements for the VI/VIM editor. We've tried to include as many as we can so you have a choice of which one to use.

Steps:

  • Download the desired .vim file [naming it ncl.vim] and put it in your .vim/syntax directory
  • Put the following two lines in your .vimrc file

    au BufRead,BufNewFile *.ncl set filetype=ncl
    au! Syntax newlang source $VIM/ncl.vim 
    

    If things do not appear to be working, then add a third line to the .vimrc file:

    syntax on
    

  • ncl1.vim -a simple approach (courtesy of Kevin Mueller [UIUC])

  • ncl2.vim - extensive highlighting of functions through v5.0.0 with some v5.1.0 functions included. (Courtesy of Arindam Chakraborty [Indian Institute of Science].)

  • ncl3.vim - includes highlighting of resources and additional new functions. (Courtesy of Carl Schreck.) Carl wrote this gen_vim_syntax.ncl script to make the ncl3.vim file. This loads a script named gen_editor_utils.ncl

  • https://github.com/xiexinyls/vim - includes indentation for "do" and "if" statements in NCL (Courtesy of Xin Xie [School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciencs, Stony Brook University].

    Be sure to download the whole directory structure. If you have git, you can also go to your home directory and type:

    git clone https://github.com/xiexinyls/vim ./.vim
    
  • The following was donated by Prince K. Xavier [Laboratoire de Meteorologie Dynamique, France].

    I experimented a bit with the VIM to include an auto-completion option for NCL commands. I think I have some good news for those who do not want to remember all the commands or consult the website often while writing a script! I find it particularly useful! Here is what you have to do.

    1. Save ncl.dic to ~/.vim/dictionary/

      (I took the commands from the ncl syntax file compiled by Arindam Chakraborty. I am not sure how complete this list is, but one can always add entries to this file.)

    2. Make the following entries to your .gvimrc

      "Show autocomplete menus.
      set complete-=k complete+=k " Add dictionary search (as per dictionary option)
      set wildmode=list:full
      set wildmenu
      au BufRead,BufNewFile *.ncl set dictionary=~/.vim/dictionary/ncl.dic
      

    3. Open your .ncl file and start typing the first letter of the command/resource/function name and press 'control+n' and choose your option.

      Here is a screenshot of my editor that works great!

  • Aaron Spring [Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Germany] has made his VIM editor enhancement available as an open-source project. Its features include:

    • completion function with short description for all NCL resources and NCL functions
    • snippets (predefined code) for recommended arguments, parenthesis, and loops
    • syntax highlighting
    • Setup instructions and animated demos of the features in action are available at GitHub

JED

The ncl.slscript was contributed by TJ Olney of Western Washington University, for use with John E Davis's JED editor.

The latest version (June 1, 2011) has been updated to work with NCL V6.0.0, and should be used with version 99.19 of jed.

JED is a freely available text editor for Unix, VMS, MSDOS, OS/2, BeOS, QNX, and win9X/NT platforms. Although it is a powerful editor designed for use by programmers, its drop-down menu facility make it one of the friendliest text editors around. Hence it is ideal for composing simple email messages as well as editing complex programs in a variety of computer languages.

JED makes extensive use of the S-Lang library, which endows it with a powerful S-Lang macro language. This and other features of the library are discussed on the features page.

To incorporate this syntax in your JED environment, add the lines from the ncl.sl to your "defaults.sl" or "jed.rc" (.jedrc) file. The instructions are also in the file.

TextMate

The NCL.tmbundle.zip script was contributed by Ryan Pavlick.

To install the file, unzip the "NCL.tmbundle.zip" file, double click "NCL.tmbundle", and restart TextMate if it is open. If that doesn't work, try opening a Terminal window and enter the following two commands:

  mkdir -p ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles/
  cp NCL.tmbundle ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles/
then restart TextMate.
gedit

This configuration was contributed by Chad Herman. The "ncl.lang" file in the ncl_gedit_xml.tgz tarball was updated September 2017 to recognize new functions/resources added through NCL V6.4.0.

To install, unwrap the ncl_gedit_xml.tgz tarball in some convenient directory, cd into the ncl_gedit_xml directory and run the install.sh bash script as follows:

    # Install for gedit 2.x
    ./install.sh 2

    # Install for gedit 3.x
    ./install.sh 3

The tarball and ncl_gedit_xml directory can be deleted after the installation.

Chad writes:

Gedit should now recognise and highlight your *.ncl files. If you start gedit in the terminal, you'll see a *warning*:

(gedit:6532): GtkSourceView-WARNING **: Cannot create a regex for all the
transitions, the syntax highlighting process will be slower than usual.
The error was: Error while compiling regular expression ...
This is nothing to worry about. This started showing up after I added all of the "resource" names (all 1,452 of them). NCL is a big language!

For MacOS X users with an official binary of gedit, Rob Nicholas of the Dept. of Geosciences at Penn State University advises:

...for those of you using the official Mac OS X binary for gedit, you'll need to change line 57 of the install script to:

sudo cp ncl.lang \
  /Applications/gedit.app/Contents/Resources/share/gtksourceview-2.0/language-specs

Rob further notes that this does not apply to users who obtained gedit through Fink or MacPorts.

Aquamacs

The ncl.el editor enhancement for Aquamacs was contributed by Luis C. Cana Cascallar of the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

Aquamacs NCL mode screenshot

Aquamacs (see http://aquamacs.org) is a free editor based on the GNU Emacs but with a deep integration in Mac OSX. These are the steps following some recommendations of David Reiter, the main developer and maintainer of Aquamacs:

  1. Download ncl.el file (the same for Emacs) and put it on the system.

    David Reiter's suggestion: /YOUR-HOME-DIRECTORY/Library/Application Support/Aquamacs Emacs

  2. Add the following piece of code in /YOUR-HOME-DIRECTORY/Library/Preferences/Aquamacs Emacs/Preferences.el

;=======================
 (setq auto-mode-alist (cons '("\.ncl$" . ncl-mode) auto-mode-alist))

 ; This line associates ncl-mode with the lisp package that defines it.
 (autoload 'ncl-mode "/YOUR-HOME-DIRECTORY/Library/Application Support/Aquamacs Emacs/ncl.el")  ; <<<<<<<< pointing to the right place

 ; a hook is a list of functions that get executed under certain
 ; conditions.
 (add-hook 'ncl-mode-hook
        (lambda ()  ; lambda is an anonymous function. e.g. has no name.
 ; highlight comments
         (set-face-foreground font-lock-comment-face "FireBrick")
 ; highlight strings
         (set-face-foreground font-lock-string-face "Salmon")
 ; highlight keywords, array descriptors, and tests
         (set-face-foreground font-lock-keyword-face "Purple")
 ; highlight built-in functions
         (set-face-foreground font-lock-builtin-face "Blue")
 ; highlight gsn* functions
         (set-face-foreground font-lock-variable-name-face "SteelBlue")
 ; highlight shea_util and contributed functions
         (set-face-foreground font-lock-function-name-face  "CadetBlue")
 ; highlight resources
         (set-face-foreground font-lock-constant-face  "ForestGreen")
          )
     )
 ;====================================

And that's all! If there is any problem, one should check first which is the Major Mode:

Mode Line (at bottom of screen).

M-x ncl-mode RET                 will enter the mode manually

Another possibility is just adding to the FIRST LINE of the ncl script this single line:

;  -*- mode: ncl;-*-

This trick switches the mode to NCL.

NetBeans

Robert Redl wrote a NetBeans plugin that supports NCL script development. It features:

  • Syntax highlighting and checking.
  • Code completion for all NCL procedures functions and resources: type the first few letters followed by CTRL-SPACE to get a list of all procedures/functions/resources that begin with those letters.
  • Displays online documentation in conjunction with code completion.
  • NCL project management: develop, manage and run ncl scripts from within the NetBeans IDE.

Netbeans is freely available for Unix/Linux, MacOS X, and Windows machines. See the NetBeans site for more information.

TextWrangler - a text editor for the Mac.

(Click on image for a slightly larger view.)

The NCL.plist editor enhancement for TextWrangler was originally contributed by Emilie Vanvyve of NCAR and enhanced by Charles Bardeen of NCAR to support generating a pull down list of functions and procedures.

Alan Brammer has continually updated and enhanced this module. Functions and procedures can now be "folded" and the "Reveal start" and "Reveal end" menu items now work. Alan put some simple code to generate this, as well as some documentation and examples up on bitbucket:

https://bitbucket.org/a1brammer/textwrangler_ncl_clm/wiki/Home

Move the NCL.plist to either:

~/Library/Application\ Support/TextWrangler/Language\ Modules/

or

/Library/Application\ Support/TextWrangler/Language\ Modules/

If TextWrangler is open, quit and restart the application.

Kate

The ncl_kate.xml.txt editor enhancement for Kate was contributed by Raul Valenzuela, a graduate student in the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Program at the University of Colorado. It highlights NCL keywords, functions, contributed functions, gsn_code functions, gsn_csm_functions, comments, strings, and metadata markers (@, !, &).

Rename the "ncl_kate.xml.txt" file to "ncl.xml", and put it in the system /usr/share/kde4/apps/katepart/syntax directory, or you can use the following shell script that installs the file in the user's kde "data" directory. Thanks to Stephen Dowdy of NCAR/RAL for this script:

#!/bin/sh
kde_data="$(kde4-config --path data 2>/dev/null | cut -d: -f1)"
kde_data="${kde_data:-${HOME}/.kde/share/apps}"  # punt to well-known location
kate_syntax="${kde_data}/katepart/syntax/"
[ ! -d "${kate_syntax}" ] && mkdir -p "${kate_syntax}"
curl -o "${kate_syntax}/ncl.xml" http://www.ncl.ucar.edu/Applications/Files/ncl.xml
SublimeText

Dr. Li Dong of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences contributed a Sublime Text package for use with NCL. Sublime Text is billed as "a sophisticated text editor for code, markup and prose". Full instructions can be found here.

[Click on image for larger view.]

Notepad++

Two users have contributed complementary enhancement files to work with the Notepad++ editor. The first file provides auto-completion capabilities, and the second file provides syntax highlighting with color.

Auto-completion

Dr. Ma Xinye and Ge Hui, from the School of Atmospherical Sciences, Nanjing University, China (worldwindmxy@gmail.com), contributed the NCL_notepad.xml.txt file, which is based on the script supplied by Dr. Li Dong who is also the contributor of Sublime Text's enhancement for NCL.

This file has been updated for NCL version 6.3.0 and can work for notepad++ v6.7.8. It provides auto-completion for NCL, including functions/procedures, graphical resources, and resource codes.

Follow these steps to achieve the function of auto-completion for notepad++:

  1. Download the NCL_notepad.xml.txt file, rename it to "NCL.xml", and put it into the correct position, for example "D:\Program Files\Notepad++\plugins\APIs\", and you will also find there are many other ".xml" files there.
  2. From the menu bar, select Settings -> Preferences -> Auto-Completion
  3. Check the "Enable auto-completion on each input", "Function and word completion", "Function parameters hint on input", "()",""
  4. Restart notepad++

The contributors have stated you can contact them directly with questions, worldwindmxy@gmail.com.

[Click on images for larger view.]

Syntax highlighting

Brian Vanderwende, a PhD student at the University of Colorado Boulder, contributed syntax highlighting files for two of the included color schemes (Default and Obsidian).

To add the schemes to Notepad++, the user simply needs to download the npp_ncl_default.xml and npp_ncl_obsidian.xml to their hard drive, and then import them in N++. Be sure to save the files without the ".txt" extension.

Follow these steps to import these schemes in N++:

  1. From the menu bar select Language -> Define Your Language
  2. Click the Import... button
  3. Select the XML file you'd like to use on the disk
  4. Restart Notepad++

From this point, any .ncl file you open should have the highlighting enabled. It recognizes NCL 6.2.0 keywords and all functions included in the nclscripts folder. Note that the formatting uses UDL2, which is only available in versions 6.2 and up of Notepad++. Below is a screenshot of the dark Obsidian theme.

[Click on image for larger view.]

Atom

Ryan Pavlick (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and Ben Schroeter (University of Tasmania) have contributed different NCL packages for Atom.


Package #1 - Ryan Pavlick

This package is based on Li Dong's Sublime Text's enhancement package and provides syntax highlighting, autocompletion, and some useful code snippets for NCL.

https://atom.io/packages/language-ncl

Installation is straightforward for Atom users, either:

Enter `apm install language-ncl` at the command line.

OR

Search for `language-ncl` in the Atom package manager and click the install button.


Package #2 - Ryan Pavlick

This package allows users to run an NCL script or a selection from an NCL script directly from their Atom editor.

Instructions for installing and using the package are here: https://github.com/rgbkrk/atom-script

To use it with NCL scripts, you need to:

  1. make sure you have language-ncl package installed: https://github.com/rpavlick/language-ncl
  2. start atom from the terminal (mostly likely you will want to be in the directory where your NCL script resides)
It should work for MacOS X, Linux, and potentially Windows.


Package #3 - Ben Schroeter

This package autocompletes NCL:

https://atom.io/packages/atom-autocomplete-ncl

There are two ways to install the package:

  1. Via the Atom Editor itself

    Atom > Preferences > Install > Search "atom-autocomplete-ncl" > Install
    

  2. Via the APM command line utility

    apm install atom-autocomplete-ncl
    

    Completions are automatically generated from the NCL documentation website, so as new major NCL releases come out, Ben said he would update the package.