How do I turn on the colors to improve readability.

Mark Olson

@Peter-Smids
This looks like YAML to me. You can turn on the YAML lexer by selecting Language -> YAML from the main menu.

BEFORE

AFTER

Peter Smids

That’s right, it’s YAML, but how do I get these colors on?

rdipardo

@Peter-Smids said in How do I turn on the colors to improve readability.:

That’s right, it’s YAML, but how do I get these colors on?

A limited number of Notepad++ themes define styles for YAML. You can try one of these, although none of them resemble your screen capture (of Sublime Text…?):

DansLeRuSH-Dark
DarkModeDefault
Deep Black
Hello Kitty
HotFudgeSundae
Khaki
MossyLawn
Navajo
Obsidian
Solarized-light
Solarized
Vim Dark Blue
Zenburn

Assuming you prefer a dark theme, you can customize one from the list (e.g., “Deep Black”) using the Style Configurator:

Another option is to add the YAML file type to a theme that doesn’t have it yet. First, do some minor customization of the target theme so it gets copied into %AppData%\Notepad++\themes (if N++ is installed for all users; otherwise just look in the themes directory wherever your portable N++ is). Open the theme’s XML file and paste these definitions anywhere under the /NotepadPlus/LexerStyles path:

<LexerType name="yaml" desc="YAML" ext="">
  <WordsStyle name="DEFAULT" styleID="0" fgColor="ADDB67" bgColor="262626" colorStyle="1" fontName="" fontStyle="0" fontSize="" />
  <WordsStyle name="COMMENT" styleID="1" fgColor="A0A0A0" bgColor="262626" colorStyle="1" fontName="" fontStyle="2" fontSize="" />
  <WordsStyle name="IDENTIFIER" styleID="2" fgColor="82AAFF" bgColor="262626" colorStyle="1" fontName="" fontStyle="1" fontSize="" />
  <WordsStyle name="INSTRUCTION WORD" styleID="3" fgColor="F08080" bgColor="262626" colorStyle="1" fontName="" fontStyle="1" fontSize="" keywordClass="instre1" />
  <WordsStyle name="NUMBER" styleID="4" fgColor="FFC600" bgColor="262626" colorStyle="1" fontName="" fontStyle="0" fontSize="" />
  <WordsStyle name="REFERENCE" styleID="5" fgColor="C0FFFF" bgColor="262626" colorStyle="1" fontName="" fontStyle="0" fontSize="" />
  <WordsStyle name="DOCUMENT" styleID="6" fgColor="E385FF" bgColor="262626" colorStyle="1" fontName="" fontStyle="0" fontSize="" />
  <WordsStyle name="TEXT" styleID="7" fgColor="93CDBA" bgColor="262626" colorStyle="1" fontName="" fontStyle="0" fontSize="" />
  <WordsStyle name="ERROR" styleID="8" fgColor="CD6000" bgColor="FFCE76" colorStyle="1" fontName="" fontStyle="1" fontSize="" />
</LexerType>

After saving the file and restarting N++, you can customize the newly YAML-aware theme in the Style Configurator.