How to create a C# plugin?

Ekopalypse

@Mark-Olson said in How to create a C# plugin?:

the Marker API

and it has a really nice feature, it provides calls to jump to next or previous marks.

Alan Kilborn

The first paragraph of the Marker API docs say, “Markers appear in the selection margin to the left of the text.”

It says that, but it is not 100% true.
If one uses SC_MARK_BACKGROUND or SC_MARK_UNDERLINE, the result is not in the margin, but rather in the text itself (as the graphical image that shows the examples–above, in Peter’s most-recent post–implies).

Entire-line coloring seems to be what @scampsd is trying to achieve, so perhaps using marker(s) with SC_MARK_BACKGROUND will be useful.

scampsd

@Alan-Kilborn Sorry for the late reply: I don’t have the time to work on this matter every day.

If I understand well, I seem to have the following choices:

Indicators : this is something which might work, but the provided example is based on the method Npp.notepad.AllocateIndicators(numberOfIndicators, out int[] indicators), which is not very clear yet.
Styles : if I understood correctly, the maximum number of styles (being 5) is not only a limitation for Notepad++ users, but also for Notepad++ plugin developers.
Markers : again another approach.

If you don’t mind, I’d like to proceed with the “Indicators” approach, but then I need to understand the AllocateIndicators() method, and it looks really not simple: the provided example launches that method and as a result, a list of indicators seems to be linked with some individual characters, present in the text.
I have done the following modifications to the example:

for (int ii = firstIndicator; ii <= lastIndicator; ii++)
{
    Npp.editor.SetIndicatorCurrent(ii);
    Npp.editor.IndicSetFore(ii, new Colour(255, 0, 0)); // Colour RED
    Npp.editor.IndicSetStyle(ii, IndicatorStyle.FULLBOX); // Use full rectangle
    Npp.editor.IndicatorFillRange(ii, 5); // Not one but five characters long
}

The result is the following:

Can anybody explain me why the mentioned indicators get linked to the 9th, the 10th, … up to the 14th character? How can I change that and link those indicators to other characters, words, lines, …?

Ekopalypse

@scampsd said in How to create a C# plugin?:

Can anybody explain me why the mentioned indicators get linked to the 9th, the 10th

You have used the IDs as the starting position.

SCI_INDICATORFILLRANGE(position start, position lengthFill)

Mark Olson

@scampsd
So the purpose of AllocateIndicators is to tell Notepad++ that you want to use a certain number of indicators. Based on how many indicators you requested, Notepad++ tells you which ones you can use (that’s the out int[] parameter). These are reserved for you for the rest of the session.

Once you have the indicators, you customize their appearance using methods like IndicSetStyle and IndicSetFore. You can do this once at startup; once you’ve customized the style it stays that way for the rest of the session.

To style a given region of a document with an indicator, use SetIndicatorCurrent and IndicatorFillRange.

To find all the regions of a document that are styled with a given indicator, use IndicatorStart, IndicatorEnd, and IndicatorValueAt as shown in this example from JsonTools.

scampsd

@Ekopalypse Thanks, I get that now.
I’m succeeding colouring some pieces of text now but you might imagine the next question: the method Npp.editor.IndicatorFillRange(int start, int length) is, as you mentioned, depending on start integer and length integer, while I’m working with entire lines.

I’m obviously capable to calculate the start and length, based on content of “| Trace |” or “| Debug |” and the newline characters (hardcoded "\r\n"), but I’m wondering if there’s not an easier way to work with lines of text in the editor.

Alan Kilborn

@scampsd said:

an easier way to work with lines of text in the editor.

I think you need to spend some time getting more familiar with the editor API, i.e., the Scintilla documentation (a portion of which was linked to earlier). It has everything you’ll need.

Mark Olson

@scampsd

I’m obviously capable to calculate the start and length

Be careful! Notepad++ uses UTF-8 to encode its buffers so you need to use JsonParser.ExtraUTF8Bytes and JsonParser.ExtraUTF8BytesBetween if you want to convert between indices in your C# strings and positions in the document.

EDIT: this is only necessary if your plugin will be running on files that contain non-ASCII characters.

PeterJones

@Alan-Kilborn said in How to create a C# plugin?:

I think you need to spend some time getting more familiar with the editor API, i.e., the Scintilla documentation (a portion of which was linked to earlier). It has everything you’ll need.

While that is good advice, for someone just getting started, it’s knowing where to look in that rather big document, or the right search terms, that is the difficulty.

For example, I’m not sure it’s natural to me to look in the “Information” section to find the commands that convert between position and line, and whether to search for line start or start line or start of line or start of the line. (And of course, a search for line or start alone finds way too many to help narrow things down.) (And yes, I did intentionally pick those examples to throw @scampsd a bone to help narrow down the search range for solving the immediate problem.)

Even as someone who has done a lot of interacting with Scintilla through the PythonScript interface, I can find it difficult to find the right command that I’m looking for, because I use the wrong term, or I don’t go to the right subsection to find the right group of commands to be able to find the one I’m looking for.

Coises

@Mark-Olson said in How to create a C# plugin?:

Notepad++ uses UTF-8 to encode its buffers

I don’t know C# or the C# interface, so this might not be relevant there, but in general, Notepad++ may work with Scintilla using UTF-8 or “ANSI” — ANSI being the system default Windows ANSI code page. SCI_GETCODEPAGE tells you which it is; in Notepad++ it is always either CP_ACP or CP_UTF8. (Defined, for example, here.)

I’m not sure how that translates to the C# functions you mentioned, but there are non-ASCII characters (128 of them, different ones for each code page) that can still be represented in ANSI mode. Like any ANSI character, they take up one position in Scintilla, not the number of positions the corresponding UTF-8 character would require.

rdipardo

@Coises said in How to create a C# plugin?:

I’m not sure how that translates to the C# functions you mentioned, but there are non-ASCII characters (128 of them, different ones for each code page) that can still be represented in ANSI mode.

See how my .NET Core template wraps all of Scintilla’s text manipulation APIs in a private method that takes account of the document’s encoding (which may be single-byte ASCII), converting to a properly encoded byte array before the window procedure call. (Note: CodePage is the name of an interface property, which .NET Framework apparently supports, since the class library is multi-targeted.)

Alan Kilborn

I said:

I think you need to spend some time getting more familiar with the editor API, i.e., the Scintilla documentation (a portion of which was linked to earlier). It has everything you’ll need.

@PeterJones said:

While that is good advice, for someone just getting started, it’s knowing where to look in that rather big document, or the right search terms, that is the difficulty.

I said what I said because I was feeling like this topic was heading in the direction of potentially a lot of spoon-feeding. Everyone should spend time with the documentation when they’re using something new, and ask detailed questions when those questions are really needed.

Ekopalypse

@scampsd

Another possibility would be to use the internal search engine of Npp and thus avoid the encoding problem.
This means using SCI_SEARCHINTARGET with a corresponding regular expression in a loop and then SCI_GETTARGETSTART and SCI_GETTARGETEND to determine the positions. SCI_GETTARGETEND then becomes the next start position for SCI_SEARCHINTARGET …

scampsd

@Ekopalypse : Let me start by thanking all of you for the wonderful support I’m getting from you guys.

At this moment I’m at the stage that I’m having the following pieces of source code:

int iAmountOfLines = Npp.editor.GetLineCount();
for (int i = 0 ; i < iAmountOfLines; i++)
{
    string strCurrentLine = Npp.editor.GetLine(i);
    if (strCurrentLine.IndexOf(Txt_Trace) != -1)
    {
        Npp.editor.SetIndicatorCurrent(0); // Trace
        Npp.editor.IndicatorFillRange(Npp.editor.GetLineEndPosition(i) - strCurrentLine.Length, Npp.editor.GetLineEndPosition(i));
    }

The “if”-clause is being repeated for all log levels, and it is currently giving the following output (not correct, but very promising 😀):

When seeing that, you might wonder how I have configured the corresponding colours. Well, me too 😥. Let me show you what I mean: this is what I see when I open the corresponding configuration form:

“But Dominique, you didn’t configure your colours?”

Well, I did, but I forgot two things:

Using the already configured colours while re-opening the configuration form, I’ll take care of that.
Saving the already configured colours in registry, in order to avoid needing to re-configure the whole thing every time I perform a test.

About that last part, I have the simple question: “Where?”.

For your information, this is what my registry looks like at “HKey_Local_Machine\SOFTWARE”:

You might notice two things:

There is another tool (Mozilla), having its plugins configured around that place.
There are no Notepad++ plugins being configured around that place. (Although I have some Notepad++ plugins I’ve used before)

Can anybody confirm if I’m at the right spot for saving Notepad++ plugin configurations? If not, what’s a place which is better suited?

Thanks in advance (again)

Ekopalypse

@scampsd

Although the registry is actually the Windows standard, I would personally avoid it and rather use the plugin config directory. Can be determined via NPPM_GETPLUGINSCONFIGDIR.
However, I would create a subdirectory with the plugin name and add a json, xml, toml … file there.