(Notepad++)++
Notepad++ has been my text editor of choice for a while. It has all the standard features: multiple document interface, regular expression search and replace, a flexible syntax highlighter that lets me work with HTML, javascript, PHP, whatever. At work I use it to keep track of tasks.
I have a pretty simple system for my tasks. I use a plain text document, where each line is prefaced by a few characters to denote whether it’s an imcomplete task, a completed task, a comment, a filename, whatever. It works great for me but the problem I have is that it can be hard to understand at a quick glance.
But today I realized that it lets you define custom highlighting rules for cases just like this.
It’s nothing much for such a small sample, but when you’re scrolling through pages of notes it’s a lot easier to pick out the red incomplete tasks from the green completed ones. And if I need to make a list of the files I needed for something, I can just look for the blue “-f-”s.
It’s features like this that separate good software from great software. Most people will never even notice it, but it makes my life a little easier.
[…] while ago I wrote about Notepad++’s awesome customizable syntax highlighting. Today I learned sometime else […]
Nice job! I have the same idea!! But i cant find how to create my custom highlighting. Can you give me example please!! Thank you.
Here’s what I did:
From the menu, select View -> User Define Dialog. This bring up the window with all the highlighting settings.
Create a new language and start filling in the settings.
On the Comment & Number tab, set the color to green and put “—” in the text box.
On the Keywords Lists tab, make one group with red for the color and “[ ]” in the text box, one with green and “[x]” in the textbox, and one with blue and “-f-”. Mess around with it until you find something that works for you.
Hope this helps and good luck.
Thank you again! I have one more question: do you know, where notepad++ store settings for our new language? I can’t find it. I think it must be in %$APPDATA%\Notepad++ directory, but there is no changes between %ProgramFiles%\Notepad++\stylers.xml and %$APPDATA%\Notepad++\stylers.xml files.
I find it :-) %$APPDATA%\Notepad++\userDefineLang.xml i think file was created whan notepad++ closing.