GEDCOM Lexer Plugin for Notepad++ / Blog: Recent posts

A new release of GedcomLexer (a Notepad++ text editor plugin for GEDCOM files) is available.
This release addresses two issues:

• In Notepad++ version 8.4, the Scintilla component was upgraded from version 4.4.6 to version 5.2.1. Notepad++ modified its plugin interface to adapt to the new Scintilla version, which broke existing external lexer plugins. GedcomLexer 0.5.0 has now been updated to work with versions of Notepad++ 8.4 and newer as well as 8.3.3 and older.... read more

A new release of GedcomLexer (a Notepad++ text editor plugin for GEDCOM files) is available. The new release has the following changes:

• Fix lexer bug: underscore ('_') is now accepted as a valid character in identifiers and pointers.
• Fix folding bugs: fold headers are now consistently placed throughout a GEDCOM file.
  Fix lexer bug: multi-byte UTF-8 code points and other MBCS code points are no longer flagged as invalid in values.... read more

A new release of GedcomLexer (a Notepad++ text editor plugin for GEDCOM files) is available. The new release has the following changes:

• Fix a variety of bugs related to determining the LangID code displayed in the plugin’s About dialog (the LangID is needed by Notepad++'s Function List feature).
• Fix a bug in the Function List parser for GEDCOM names, that prevented the names to be displayed for GEDCOM files exported from Ancestry.com family trees.
• Convert the project to use Visual Studio 2015 for development.... read more

Tamura Jones has announced his 2014 GeneAwards winners at Modern Software Experience. I was quite surprised to see that in the category of "Best New Genealogy Add-On of 2014," my GEDCOM Plugin for Notepad++ received a second-place, honourable mention. ... read more

Earlier this week, the GEDCOM plugin made it to the official list of Notepad++ plugins. Registering a plugin and getting it accepted is fairly easy. But there is a big benefit to the user: your desired plugin is just a click away. No more downloads, unpacking zips, and copying files to multiple directory locations.

You can thank the Plugin Manager (also a plugin!) developed by Dave Brotherstone for this effective system of plugin management. When you register a plugin, you supply the information the Plugin Manager needs to find your zip (a download URL), identify its version, and tell it what needs to be extracted and where it should go. With just that information the Plugin Manager can perform installs and updates of registered plugins. It does this magic and also stops and restarts Notepad++ to make the changes take effect. And if the plugin doesn't do what you want, it's just as easy to remove it.... read more

GEDCOM Plugin v0.2 can now use the Function List to navigate to individual names. This allows you to double-click a name in a list to go directly to that INDI record in the GEDCOM file.

Notepad++ has a Function List plugin that comes already installed (more...). At one time this was an independent plugin developed by Jens Lorenz, but has been integrated into the main program since version 6.4.... read more

This release of the GEDCOM plugin for Notepad++ adds two new features. First, the plugin now preserves your style customizations when updating, and second, something called a "langID" is displayed in the About dialog. (It is needed for Notepad++'s Function List.) In this post, I'll discuss the first one.

When first installed, the plugin styles the text of a GEDCOM file using the default global style font (for my system it is Courier New, size 10, black on white) and adds the following style adjustments for each grammar element:... read more

I have been looking at raw GEDCOM files quite a lot lately. I usually go to the Notepad++ text editor for this because it is good at recognizing file encodings. Notepad++'s popularity derives from it being open-source and general-purpose, robust and lightweight. Many plugins have been developed for it to extend its capabilities to more specialized uses (especially for programmers). So that prompted me to cook up a GEDCOM plugin to provide syntax highlighting and folding.... read more