autocomplete with every word a different color

B M

Is there an easy way to have autocomplete color-code every word (excluding a small set of articles, etc)?

Basically, the first time you write “MRI”, it would pick a color from a palette and then keep that for all instances of the word MRI, and other words would get their own color as well.

Is this feasible? I’d like to do this to help with visual text analysis.

PeterJones

@B-M ,

Is there an easy way to have autocomplete color-code every word

First off, because of the phrasing, people are going to immediately assume you are asking about Notepad++'s auto-completion technology, which has nothing to do with coloring of the text.

I believe what you really want is for Notepad++ to automatically pick a color for each word (except for a small set of articles), and apply that color to all instances of that word.

If that’s what you meant, then no, there is no way to do that.

Notepad++ has a “syntax highlighter” but it essentially relies on a predefined list of keywords, and only has a limited number of color styles available: most syntax highlighters for builtin languages only have about a dozen colors chosen, and most of those are for things like operators and quotes, so there are usually only 2-3 categories/colors assigned to keywords; in the User Defined Languages, you can have 8 different groups of keywords, where every keyword in the same group will be the same color – but that won’t give you the differentiation you appear to be looking for.

There are 5 different distinct colors available for manual styling of tokens (matching words) using Search > Style All Occurrences of Token and related commands. And by manually styling with multiple colors in a row (without clearing that style), you can actually get 2^5=32 different colors (from no-highlights to all-five-colors). But they have to be applied manually (or you have to have a scripting plugin and be able to write a script to apply those). But Notepad++ won’t do that automatically for you, and 32 different colors still might not be enough for you, given your problem description. Sorry.

Michael Vincent

@B-M said in autocomplete with every word a different color:

visual text analysis

Not as easy as just typing and it magically happening as you describe, but for “visual text analysis” there is the Analyze Plugin.

Cheers.

PeterJones

@B-M ,

I was actually cogitating over this for the past day, because I thought a simplified version of your request might be doable in a scripting plugin:

If you are willing to use a script for the PythonScript plugin and run it manually, then this might be enough for you.

When you run the script, it will analyze the active file’s wordlist, and assign a foreground color to the N most-frequent words from the active file. (It will ignore 1 and 2-letter words, and anything in the list of stopwords. The default stopwords include some linking verbs, conjunctions, articles, and prepositions; there are probably other words that should be in the default list, but it was enough for proof-of-concept.)

You can edit the script to change the “stopwords” by adding words into the string. You can change the palette by editing the list in def createPalette(): , and by doing that, you can change how many words will be colored.

The 2022-Dec-13 source for the script is included in the post. The link above will always take you to my most recent version (in case I make future bugfixes or feature additions).

Script

# encoding=utf-8
"""in response to https://community.notepad-plus-plus.org/topic/23883/

When run, this script will count all the words (except for stopwords),
and assign a color to each word in the list of Top N Colors

Edit the contents of the stopwords variable to change which words are ignored
    - the default stopwords are some linking verbs, conjunctions, articles, and prepositions
    - words of 1 or two characters are automatically annoyed

Edit the list of appended colors in createPalette() to change the color palette
    - you can change the colors to your liking
    - you can add or remove colors to change the number of words that will be colored
    - the default color list is based on mspaint.exe's palette on my laptop

Based heavily on these:
- @Alan-Kilborn     https://community.notepad-plus-plus.org/post/61801
- @Ekopalypse       https://github.com/Ekopalypse/NppPythonScripts/blob/master/npp/EnhanceAnyLexer.py


"""
from Npp import editor,notepad,console, INDICATORSTYLE, INDICFLAG, INDICVALUE
from random import randint

class FrequentHighlighter(object):
    INDICATOR_ID = 0

    stopwords = """
    be am are is was were been has have
    and but or nor for yet so
    the an
    aboard about above across after against along amid among around as at before behind below beneath beside between beyond but by concerning considering despite down during except following for from in inside into like minus near next of off on onto opposite out outside over past per plus regarding round save since than through till to toward under underneath unlike until up upon versus via with within without
    """.split()

    @staticmethod
    def rgb(r, g, b):
        '''
            Helper function
            Retrieves rgb color triple and converts it
            into its integer representation

            Args:
                r = integer, red color value in range of 0-255
                g = integer, green color value in range of 0-255
                b = integer, blue color value in range of 0-255
            Returns:
                integer
        '''
        return (b << 16) + (g << 8) + r

    def match_found(self, m):
        self.word_matches.append(editor.getTextRange(m.span(0)[0], m.span(0)[1]).lower())

    def createPalette(self):
        self.palette = []
        self.palette.append(self.rgb(237,28,36))
        self.palette.append(self.rgb(255,174,201))
        self.palette.append(self.rgb(255,127,39))
        self.palette.append(self.rgb(255,201,14))
        self.palette.append(self.rgb(255,242,0))
        self.palette.append(self.rgb(239,228,176))
        self.palette.append(self.rgb(34,177,76))
        self.palette.append(self.rgb(181,230,29))
        self.palette.append(self.rgb(0,162,232))
        self.palette.append(self.rgb(153,217,234))
        self.palette.append(self.rgb(63,72,204))
        self.palette.append(self.rgb(112,146,190))
        self.palette.append(self.rgb(163,73,164))
        self.palette.append(self.rgb(200,191,231))

        self.word_palette = {}  # word palette will be populated later

    def go(self):
        self.createPalette()
        editor.indicSetStyle(self.INDICATOR_ID, INDICATORSTYLE.TEXTFORE)
        editor.indicSetFlags(self.INDICATOR_ID, INDICFLAG.VALUEFORE)
        self.word_matches = []
        self.histogram_dict = {}
        editor.research('[[:alpha:]]{3,}', self.match_found)
        for word in self.word_matches:
            if word not in self.histogram_dict:
                self.histogram_dict[word] = 1
            elif word not in self.stopwords:
                self.histogram_dict[word] += 1
            elif word in self.stopwords:
                if word in self.histogram_dict: del self.histogram_dict[word]

        output_list = []
        for word in sorted(self.histogram_dict, key=self.histogram_dict.get, reverse=True):
            if len(self.palette) > 0:
                self.word_palette[word] = self.palette.pop(0)   # equivalent to perl's shift, where pop() without argument is perl's pop
                output_list.append('{}={} [0x{:06x}]'.format(word, self.histogram_dict[word], self.word_palette[word]))
            elif self.histogram_dict[word] > 1:
                output_list.append('{}={}'.format(word, self.histogram_dict[word]))

        #console.write('\r\n'.join(output_list) + "\r\n\r\n")

        # do the coloring
        self.colored = 0
        editor.research('[[:alpha:]]{3,}', self.match_colorize)


    def match_colorize(self, m):
        a,b = m.span(0)
        word = editor.getTextRange(m.span(0)[0], m.span(0)[1]).lower()

        if word in self.histogram_dict:
            if not word in self.word_palette: return
            # console.write("{:<3d} => 0x{:06x}\tword='{}'[{}] from {}..{} = len:{}\n".format(self.colored, self.word_palette[word], word, self.histogram_dict[word],a,b,b-a))
            editor.setIndicatorCurrent(self.INDICATOR_ID)
            editor.setIndicatorValue(self.word_palette[word])
            editor.indicatorFillRange(a, b-a)
            self.colored = self.colored + 1


FrequentHighlighter().go()