Hi and I'm working on a WPF fork of NppCSharpPluginPack

Jonathan Johansen

Hi! I’ve been loving Notepad++ for years, as expected ;-). I’m a WPF developer by day, so I was wanting to make a plugin with it (to evaluate Common Lisp code from files - so maybe you can push me to alternatives that might do that). But before going straight in, I’ve started trying to migrate Mark Olson’s cool NppCSharpPluginPack (thanks Mark for it!) to WPF to get a feel for if it was feasible. I see WPF isn’t mentioned much in the forum,

I’ve just been messing around, but I’ve got a few of the UI’s migrated, but I’m fighting to get keyboard input into TextBoxes when in a docked UI. I can paste in text, and KeyDown events fire, but no text gets inserted.

So this post is to see what you knowledgeable people think about the idea, alternatives, and if anyone else is interested in bashing heads with me on WPF in a plugin.

I’ll fork Mark’s repo and replay my changes (I should have started that way…) in the next week or so - but if that’s too long, let me know. Will post the repo in a reply here when done.

Thanks!
Jonathan Johansen
www.carelinks.net

Mark Olson

@Jonathan-Johansen

Hi, I’m the maintainer of NppCSharpPluginPack. Glad to hear you’re interested in creating a new variant with WPF, and I hope you’re able to make something you’re happy with.

I don’t know anything about WPF, but I do know that forms (especially docking forms) in a Notepad++ plugin have to do a bunch of annoying fiddly things to ensure that they work correctly. I recommend reading carefully through NppFormHelper.cs and FormBase.cs, because they contain a few methods that you need to create WPF versions of to ensure your forms work correctly.

More specifically, I’m guessing that your keyboard input problem is due to not registering your form with NPPM_MODELESSDIALOG.

Jonathan Johansen

@Mark-Olson Thanks! I have been migrating your code in-place, and I do get the ElementHost’s handle and pass it to Npp.notepad.AddModelessDialog(handle);. I will read through thoroughly - I’m also thinking to check something diagnostic like Spy++?

Jonathan Johansen

Oh, it’s interesting - When I don’t call Npp.notepad.AddModelessDialog(host.Handle);, I can type into the TextBox, but I can’t copy/paste with Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V. When I do call Npp.notepad.AddModelessDialog(host.Handle);, I can’t type in, but I can copy/paste with Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V. Curious.

Jonathan Johansen

The fork is here: https://github.com/framlingham/NppCSharpPluginPack#

Mark Olson

@Jonathan-Johansen said in Hi and I'm working on a WPF fork of NppCSharpPluginPack:

Oh, it’s interesting - When I don’t call Npp.notepad.AddModelessDialog(host.Handle);, I can type into the TextBox, but I can’t copy/paste with Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V. When I do call Npp.notepad.AddModelessDialog(host.Handle);, I can’t type in, but I can copy/paste with Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V. Curious.

OK, that’s really weird. I’ve never had any problem like that before. @rdipardo is kind of a wizard when it comes to the low-level operation of forms; I’m mentioning him in the hopes that he will be able to give you some advice.