Notepad++

[Stewart Gordon]

Sergey Gromov wrote:
> Thu, 13 Aug 2009 01:40:47 +0100, Stewart Gordon wrote:
<snip>
>> It puzzles me that they didn't make this plugin powerful enough to 
>> highlight the language it (and indeed the whole of Notepad++) is written 
>> in.  Even more so considering the sheer number of C-like languages out 
>> there, which people are likely to want to use N++ to write.
> 
> Well I think it's hard to create a regular expression engine flexible
> enough to allow arbitrary highlighting.

I can't see how it can be at all complicated to find the beginning and 
end of a C string or character literal.

This (Posix?) regexp

"(\\.|[^\\"])*"

works as I try (though not in the tiny subset of Posix regexps that N++ 
understands).  But that's an aside - you don't need regexps at all to 
get it working at this basic level, only a rudimentary concept of escape 
sequences.

> I think the best such engine
> I've seen was Colorer by Igor Russkih, and even there I wasn't able to
> express D's WYSIWYG or delimited strings.  You need a real programming
> language for that.

For WYSIWYG strings, all that's needed is a generic highlighter that 
supports:
- the aforementioned string escapes
- multiple types of string literals distinguished by whether they 
support string escapes, and not just delimiters

TextPad's syntax highlighting engine manages 2/3 of this without any 
regexps (or anything to that effect).  That said, I've just found that 
it can do a little bit of what remains: I can make it do `...` but not 
r"..." at the expense of distinguishing string and character literals.

But token-delimited strings are indeed more complex to deal with.  (How 
many people do we have putting them to practical use at the moment, for 
that matter?)

> ---
> 
> I've just had a look at Notepad++ sources.  The Scintilla they use
> contains Scintilla's built-in D lexer.  I think it's just not
> configured.

Sounds as though N++'s developers overlooked to keep the configuration 
files up to date as new languages have been added to Scintilla.

> SciTE uses *.properties files to configure stuff.
> Notepad++ uses XML files for the same purpose.  I think it's all in
> langs.model.xml.  My current idea is to take d.properties from the
> corresponding release of SciTE and try to translate it into the
> langs.model.xml format.  I'll probably try it later when I have time.
> 
> Of course it would be nice to replace the original D lexer with mine.
> Or, even better, to ask Scintilla developers to include my lexer into
> the official bundle.  May be worth a try.

You have two good plans there.

Scintilla's definition of a plugin is confusing - normally plugins are 
things that can be dynamically loaded at runtime, rather than having to 
compile them in.  If only....

Stewart.