Notepad++

Sergey Gromov snake.scaly at gmail.com
Wed Aug 12 13:20:17 PDT 2009


Wed, 12 Aug 2009 18:12:41 +0100, Stewart Gordon wrote:

> What's the best anybody's managed to get Notepad++ to syntax-highlight 
> D?  (I'm on version 5.4.5, if that makes a difference.)
> 
> My userDefineLang.xml file is as given here
> http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?EditorSupport/NotepadPlus
> (note that I've fixed a few errors I've no idea how got there).
> 
> Notepad++ does a good job of syntax-highlighting PHP files, whose 
> syntactic structure is more complex than that of D.  So clearly, 
> Notepad++ is a powerful syntax-highlighter (or Scintilla is, whatever). 
>   However, at the moment I can't even seem to get it up to C standard! 
> (Can anybody find a full reference of the userDefineLang.xml format, for 
> that matter?)

Scintilla uses plugins to highlight source.  These plugins are written
in C++ and have almost full access to the buffer so the highlighter code
may be arbitrarily complex.  I actually wrote such a plugin to highlight
D a while back:

http://dsource.org/projects/scrapple/browser/trunk/scilexer

It seems like Notepad++ developers added their own highlighter plugin
which takes userDefineLang.xml as its configuration.  Such a
configurable plugin is presumably much less flexible than pure C++
implementation for a particular language.  It's very likely that PHP
highlighter is written in C++ and comes bundled with Scintilla.



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