Add support for semantic highlighting so that syntax plugins work without any modification

This is just an idea I had. I have no idea how feasible it is, or if it covers all cases.

The problem with a lot of highlighting plugins is that they do not work well with the syntax highlighter that is used by VSCode. In most cases, they are simply ignored and we have to modify the highlighting groups inside init.vim in order to force a certain terminal highlighting color.

I propose adding a semantic highlighter that receives the colors from Neovim and applies them to the VSCode editor. This will probably require wrapping existing VSCode highlighters and combining the results. I don’t know whether VCode has an API that supports this, but it might be interesting to find out.

[asvetliakov]

vscode semantic api is pull model. however neovim HL is only push model and only for current neovim viewport. it’s useless

[samvv]

Support for more Neovim plugins that (ab)use the syntax highlighting would be the main use case. They would just work without any adjustments, which is in theory why this extension exists in the first place. However I agree that the benefits may not outweigh the costs in terms of development time.