Recently, when I pushed some gren-lang code to GitHub, it was missing the syntax highlighting. Since GitHub recognises ELM and the same can be used for Gren, I was looking for ways to override the language definition on GitHub.

That led me to the github-linguist/linguist, the library GitHub uses to detect the languages. Using the override strategies, I was able to get the syntax highlighting for .gren files.

Using .gitattributes file

I added the .gitattributes file with the below content in the project root, and GitHub started showing Elm syntax highlighting for all the .gren files in the repository.

*.gren linguist-language=Elm

Another use case can be to syntax highlight for JSON with comments file

.vscode/*.json linguist-language=JSON-with-Comments

Below image shows the difference between before and after overriding the language definition of JSON with comments files.