Here is my post about changing file type icons in the registry. It also changes the file type descriptions.

@pbarney Finally, some actual assistance on this forum. Thank you!

The code I mentioned that was spat out included the <pre>, just in a different format. So I guess my fiddling was on the right path. I appreciate you taking the time to reply though, it gives me more info on what that code is/does.

@pbarney said in Need clarification about "built-in" language lexers:

But I just noticed that I don’t have the language file for Python installed.

If you think it’s an individual file for each language, which “language file” are you talking about? I’ll come back to this point

I must have deselected it on install. It’s not listed under Languages → P.

Then, at some point, you probably went to Preferences > Languages and moved Python to Disabled Items. Note that when it’s in the Disabled Items list, it doesn’t actually disable that language from doing syntax highlighting, it just removes it from the visible Languages > … menu, to declutter your menu from languages you don’t use; if you open a file that has the right extension (like .py for Python files), then it will recognize it and automatically choose Python, even though you don’t see Python in the menu. You will notice, even in your current state, that Settings > Style Configurator’s Language pulldown still has Python available, and when you choose it, there are still colors defined for Python’s various styles.

So I asked ChatGPT why,

Why would you believe that atrocity?

Scintilla’s underlying lexer library SciLexer.dll has it’s own built-in lexers that are available to NPP even if you don’t explicitly install them in NPP.

Yes. And no. That random text generator only listed 53, but as is obvious from the user manual, there are around 90. So it’s underreporting by almost a factor of 2.

then why would NPP even include language files for these languages?

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of how Notepad++ and Scintilla work together.

Scintilla – or, more accurately, Lexilla – provides the code (the logic) that does the lexing. Notepad++ decides which of the Lexilla lexers it enables from the library. Lexilla has many lexers which Notepad++ doesn’t enable; and Notepad++ can actually use the same lexer for many languages (if the lexer is designed that way; for example, XML and HTML and some others are all done by the same lexer) The langs.xml is used to define the default extensions for a language (the ones that show up in the Style Configuator’s Default ext.: box:
1a5226fd-4204-4708-8d16-c896063858f0-image.png The langs.xml is also used to define the default lists of Keywords for some of the styles (like the KEYWORDS style in Python):
d601bfd0-e210-43cf-8ba5-0d5d662814b9-image.png The stylers.xml or themes\<ThemeName>.xml is used to store which colors are assigned to each style for a given language The functionList\<languageName>.xml is used to determine what things show up if you have View > Function List panel visible The autoCompletion\<languageName>.xml is used to determine which keywords are available for easy auto-completion, and which function parameters are know for function-parameter auto-completion

So, to sum up:

there is no one “file” for a given built-in language you purposefully removed Python from the menu at some point (and presumably forgot about it), but that doesn’t disable the Python lexer, it just removes it from the menu you mistakenly believed a random number generator that “predicts” the next word in its response based on statistics on the words that came before could actually provide you with facts or truth. If you’re lucky, an LLM like ChatGPT might point you in the right direction – you just weren’t lucky

Hello again!

Small update: it looks like I got the repo (discussed in the PR), so in the future I’ll try to keep the WebEdit plugin up to date. 🎉

This is a huge honor for me, as WebEdit has been a cornerstone of Notepad++ for me for a very long time, and I still actively use it!

Although I’m primarily a PHP developer, since Modula-2/Oberon-2 is a PASCAL-like language (no offense intended!), and C# is hopefully close to my plugin written in C++ (I’ll continue this too!), I hope I can rise to the task. 🫡

So the v2.7.rc.3 release above (with a slightly different approach) ;) is still alive.

@Coises
Yes.
This is why CNppExec::convertSciText uses the actual Scintilla’s encoding nSciCodePage to convert Scintialla’s text to a desired encoding:
https://github.com/d0vgan/nppexec/blob/develop/NppExec/src/NppExec.cpp#L2516