PICK BASIC STYLE PLUGIN?
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Hello,
I am a programmer / developer that has been working in the PICK platform for 30 years. I love Notepad++, it is a fantastic editor.
But I don’t seem to see a plugin for BASIC.
Now I understand that BASIC is an old and archaic programming language, but, It’s still in use. I also understand that BASIC programs, by design, don’t have a qualifying file extension.
Is there a plugin that I could substitute or perhaps I could create one myself that could be used for the styling of the basic language?
Thanks and best regards,
Anthony J. Torre
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You could look to see if anyone wrote a BASIC “lexer” for Scintilla (the editor control Notepad++ uses). There is a Visual Basic one already in Notepad++ but guess there is enough differences for that to not really work (sorry, never used BASIC or VB or VB.net)? I also found one in the current source for “blitzbasic”, “purebasic” and “freebasic”, but does not appear to be active in Notepad++.
https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/blob/master/scintilla/lexers/LexBasic.cxx
To just color “keywords” (e.g. “if”, “else”, “return”, etc.) you have the built in “User defined language” feature (Language -> define Your language…).
If there are language features you want more complex than what that can handle (context sensitive keywords, string interpolation, etc.) you can write your own lexer DLL. I have been prototyping some stuff at https://github.com/wnewbery/npp-languages which creates a plugin DLL for Notepad++ to load extra languages/styles from. Still deciding how want to deal with code folding, etc., but you have the default ones as complete examples of the lexer part.
The file extension thing would mean you must manually select the language each time. Although personally a more plugable way would be great as a feature, BASIC is not alone for that (e.g. things like
makefile,Gemfile, or Linux scripts using a shebang)
