Community

    • Login
    • Search
    • Recent
    • Tags
    • Popular
    • Users
    • Groups
    • Search

    UDL suggestion - switch to general regular expressions

    General Discussion
    2
    2
    1126
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as topic
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with topic management privileges can see it.
    • Jindřich Vavruška
      Jindřich Vavruška last edited by

      Hello,

      I have recently experienced a sizable dose of frustration when I tried to implement a few very simple UDL rules for Forth (see here: https://notepad-plus-plus.org/community/topic/12820/how-to-fix-bugs-in-custom-language-highlighting )

      Why don’t we just dump the whole UDL setup, which is quite complicated and yet very inefficient, as it appears, and why don’t we just replace it by a collection of regular expressions linked to the respective styling? There could still be some simple tool to generate rules from lists of keywords or operators (building RE from a list is quite trivial), but for any other elements there would be much more flexibility.

      I think maintaining the complex set of forms for UDL is not very useful if it cannot highlight even common situations in many common languages.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Jim Dailey
        Jim Dailey last edited by

        I’m guessing the UDL was developed by someone who wanted something to highlight unsupported file types in a manner that the average person can make use of. Without it, you would have to write a lexer for Scintilla, and not many NPP users are going to do that.

        I wish the UDL was more powerful (supporting regex in some ways, for example), but it offers a decent set of options for highlighting many types of “non-standard” files. I have certainly put it to good use–I have 13 UDL file types. :-)

        I’m afraid that your desire can only be met by someone who shares that desire to a great degree and who has the ability to write an NPP plugin that will fulfill that desire.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • First post
          Last post
        Copyright © 2014 NodeBB Forums | Contributors