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.
