PHP syntax highlighting for .html files in Brackets.io Editor

Question

I work with a templating engine which is powered by .html template files. These templates also allow the use of PHP. Is it possible to enable PHP syntax highlighting for .html files?

Update: As of Sprint 39, Brackets now allows you to include a ".brackets.json" file in your project directory which lets you map file extensions to languages.

This will let you use php syntax highlighting within a html file.

{
    "language.fileExtensions": {
        "html": "php"
    }
}

Answer 1

Update 2: As of Brackets 0.42, this is even simpler still:

1. Open an .html file
2. Change the status bar dropdown from HTML to PHP
3. Open the dropdown again and click "Set as Default for .html Files"

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Earlier update: You can now do this via a simple Brackets extension, without needing to modify the core code:

define(function (require, exports, module) {
    var LanguageManager = brackets.getModule("language/LanguageManager");
    var htmlLang = LanguageManager.getLanguage("html"),
        phpLang  = LanguageManager.getLanguage("php");
    htmlLang.removeFileExtension("html");
    phpLang.addFileExtension("html");
});

1. Put this code in a file named main.js
2. In Brackets, go to Help > Show Extensions Folder
3. Create a new folder under user, and place the main.js file inside it
4. Restart Brackets

Here's more info on writing Brackets extensions, if needed.

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(old answer)

Unfortunately this is tricky in Brackets currently. Syntax highlighting is extensible in that you can assign new file extensions to a particular highlighting mode, but the ".html" extension is already in use by the plain-HTML highlighting mode.

Your best options are probably:

a) Pull Brackets from git and locally patch the languages.json file so that .html is interpreted as PHP instead. (You could do this in a regular installed build but it won't be fun, since that JSON file is baked into a giant minified blob). Running from a git copy isn't too hard though.

b) Rename all your files to reflect that they're not plain HTML. Brackets will automatically recognize ".phtml" for example, which seems like a more appropriate file extension anyway. (If there's some other extension that your templating system will use but Brackets doesn't recognize automatically, you can use this trick to register it as a PHP-type extension).