Question: I am working on a product which has its own SQL like language to query the database. We call it **Reporting language**. Now, I want to have a text editor which does highlighting specific to my language .i.e I can specify the keywords (purple-colour), datatypes(red colour), comments green colour, and everything else black colour and so on. 

Is there an existing tool whom I can give these specifications as input and output is a text editor which does this language specific highlighting. 

Please do not hesitate replying any information even if its too basic.
Thanks in advance.

Answer: 
[Emacs](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs) is the world's most configurable and extensible editor. 

It is possible to define "modes" for emacs, which support editing documents that conform to a particular format. For example, there are existing emacs "modes" for 

* C/C++
* Java
* C#
* VB.NET
* perl
* Powershell
* SQL
* .htaccess
* html
* css
* javascript
* xml
* and many others

"Modes" can be something as simple as syntax highlighting (or as emacs calls it, *fontification*). Most modes, though, provide other features like autocompletion, syntax checking, template insertion, and compilation helpers. You define an emacs mode in elisp, which is a variant of LISP.

If your requirements are relatively simple, then you could produce an emacs mode in less than an hour. Most modes are open-source, so you can start with an existing mode, and change it to your purposes, or simply learn from it.

Also see [A 'hello world' example for a major mode in Emacs?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1063115/a-hello-world-example-for-a-major-mode-in-emacs)

Emacs is free, and open source, and runs on any platform.
Syntax highlighting is just a tiny part of writing a text editor. You're going to have much more trouble writing a general text editor than making it do syntax highlighting. A "syntax highlighting editor generator" is too narrow an application to have a tool for it as far as I can tell.

Also, I don't expect my customers to switch editors just to edit a certain file format. You're much better of writing a mode for a popular (cross platform) editor like Emacs, vim or eclipse. 

If you just want to display your language with syntax highlighting, use [pygments](http://pygments.org/) which you can embed into (python) applications (e.g. <https://gist.github.com/773300>) or [SyntaxHighlighter](http://alexgorbatchev.com/SyntaxHighlighter/) for web presentation.