#1157 Advanced syntax highlighting for Notepad++(from scintilla)

[Alex Evans]

Sorry if this winds up in the wrong thread, it's my first time making a ticket on source forge.

I have a feature request. I'm a notepad++ user and I wan't to use some more advanced syntax highlighting and I was told this was the place to put in a feature request as the cpp lexer apparently needed to be updedted first. I think a feature to highlight user defined classes, variables, and ADTs with custom syntax highlighting would be very usefull. This goes a bit beyond simply using a keyword identifier though so it can't currently be done in notepad++ as I understand it. I would like to request that this ability is added to scintilla so that Npp can implement this. To better illustrate my request I'll list some quick examples:

typedef double aFloatValue;
typedef integer anIntegerValue;
typedef char aCharacterValue;

in this case I would want to add syntax highlighting to aFloatValue, anIntegerValue, and aCharacterValue.

class myNewClass
{
public:
//code…
private:
//code…
}

class myNewClass2
{
public:
//code…
private:
//code…
}

And in this case I would want myNewClass and myNewClass2 to have a different highlighting from the typedef above.

then I would also want to be able to add highlighting to variables such as:
double dnum;
int num;
char character;

where dnum, num, and character should have a style for highlighting separate from classes and typedefs.

I think this would be really handy, but after looking at the scintilla code it looks very complex and I unfortunately don't have the time to try to figure out how to modify it myself as this is a very complex tool and it would take me a long time to figure out how it functions. Hopefully this is something you are able and willing to implement as I would love to have the added feature, thank you for your time.

[Neil Hodgson]

This is well outside the scope of a lexer as type information is generally produced by a parser rather than a lexer. Parsers are much larger than lexers and it is not feasible to include parsers within Scintilla.

Within an application, you may include a parser or some way of calling a separate parser process. That information could then be used by the application to style the file. Some applications like Qt Creator and KDevelop call Clang to parse files.

Since this is outside the scope of the project, I'm marking this request as "Won't_Implement".

[Neil Hodgson]

Closing since this won't be implemented.