ide-mode gives us back data on how to highlight the sourcecode: http://docs.idris-lang.org/en/latest/reference/ide-protocol.html#source-code-highlighting this would need some sort of dynamic grammar see discussions on how to do it: https://discuss.atom.io/t/syntax-highlighting-using-existing-tokenizer/13608 https://discuss.atom.io/t/automatically-update-to-dynamic-grammar/10181 https://discuss.atom.io/t/defining-a-language-grammar-via-code/14784/2 https://discuss.atom.io/t/dynamic-grammers/14927/3