Highlight .qkt files on GitHub

GitHub colours source files with the grammars that Linguist ships. qkt is not a Linguist language yet, so GitHub shows a .qkt file as plain text unless you tell it which grammar to borrow. qkt borrows the Haskell grammar: qkt's UPPERCASE keywords, -- comments, operators, numbers and strings each get a distinct colour.

Where the file lives	What to do
Repository (public or private)	Add .gitattributes (projects from qkt create template already have it)
Gist	Put the modeline -- -*- mode: haskell -*- on the first line
Your editor	Install the real qkt grammar: editor integrations

Repositories

Add this file at the repository root and push:

.gitattributes

*.qkt linguist-language=Haskell linguist-detectable=false

• linguist-language=Haskell picks the grammar GitHub uses to colour .qkt files.
• linguist-detectable=false keeps .qkt out of the repository's language bar, so the repository is not reported as Haskell. Highlighting is unaffected.

Every project created with qkt create template includes this .gitattributes. For an existing repository, copy the line above. GitHub applies it to files already in the repository as soon as the commit is pushed.

To check what Git will tell GitHub:

git check-attr -a -- strategies/my_strategy.qkt
# strategies/my_strategy.qkt: linguist-language: Haskell
# strategies/my_strategy.qkt: linguist-detectable: false

Gists

Gists ignore .gitattributes. Linguist also reads editor modelines, so start the file with a qkt comment that names the grammar:

-- -*- mode: haskell -*-
STRATEGY ema_cross VERSION 1
...

The qkt parser treats the line as an ordinary comment, so the file still runs unchanged. Use the Emacs form shown here rather than a Vim modeline (vim: ft=haskell): a Vim modeline would also switch Vim and Neovim from the real qkt grammar to Haskell.

If you would rather not add a line, name the gist file with a .hs extension instead (ema_cross.qkt.hs), at the cost of a file name that no longer ends in .qkt.

What the colours cover

The Haskell grammar knows nothing about qkt, so the colours follow the shape of the code rather than its meaning:

qkt	Coloured as
UPPERCASE words: STRATEGY, WHEN, THEN, BUY, BRACKET, and broker/symbol names such as EXNESS:XAUUSD	constructor
POSITION. and other UPPERCASE. qualifiers	constant
=, <=, !=, ., -, /	operator
Numbers	constant
-- comments and "strings"	comment, string
lowercase names: lag, percentile_rank, parameters	plain text

SQL, the grammar qkt borrowed before, coloured only a handful of qkt keywords (AND, TIMES, POSITION). The choice was made by rendering the same strategies under several grammars that use -- comments and counting the coloured tokens; Haskell and PureScript coloured the most, and Haskell also separates POSITION. from keywords.

Keywords are not coloured by what they do (a rule keyword and an order keyword look the same). That needs a qkt grammar inside Linguist, which Linguist accepts only once .qkt is used across a large number of public repositories owned by different people.