@Alan-Kilborn ,
Several more things to directly answer your questions and to give you some idea on the Notepad++ implementation for the plugin messages (at least as I remember it and as I understand it):
So is this actually a bug in the ComparePlus plugin?
I don’t consider it a bug, it is simply how I have implemented that functionality.
Does it work without the double quotes because it must be used as the last argument on the N++ command line, and anything after -pluginMessage= is passed to the plugin and not looked at at all by N++?
Again, it works that way because I have implemented it that way and it is not meant to be the last option on the command line.
I think Notepad++ will get everything after -pluginMessage= and send it to the plugins regardless of the quotes. If there are quotes then the message will include the spaces inside otherwise it will stop on the first space. That’s my idea on that, I haven’t checked it (at least now) but I surely have done some tests back then when I implemented the message parsing.
And how does N++ know that this specific one is meant for the ComparePlus plugin?
It doesn’t know. It sends the message to all plugins.
So what I understood about the Notepad++ “message to plugins” function when I was implementing the handling in CP is that on Notepad++ start it parses the command line and sends dedicated message to all plugins with the string from the command line.
I didn’t like that enough for my needs so I implemented N++ command line parsing directly in CP and I do not handle the N++ plugin message. I wanted to avoid parsing the plugins message string because that would mean that I had to avoid accidentally matching “compare” word if another plugin used it or to implement some other more distinctive string to trigger compare.
I wanted the compare trigger to be something simple so the user doesn’t have to write much on the command line so I simply check if the command line contains -pluginMessage=compare.
