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

Mark Olson

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.

pbarney

@Jonathan-Johansen What is the benefit of using WPF instead of what we already have?

rdipardo

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

@rdipardo is kind of a wizard when it comes to the low-level operation of forms

I’m also unfamiliar with WPF, but I can suggest to @Jonathan-Johansen that hosting the docking form on a WindowsFormsHost might be a better approach. That would at least provide access to a Win32-style window procedure, useful for debugging how (of if) the WM_CHAR message is being handled.

Alternatively, try to expose the window handle of the existing WPF UserControl and pass that to the NPPM_MODELESSDIALOG wrapper instead of the ElementHost (as was tried already ). Or maybe there’s a way for WPF controls to broadcast messages to their child components…🤔?

Jonathan Johansen

@pbarney The benefit of using WPF is that (in my opinion):

I like WPF and have 6 years experience in it, but no experience with WinForms.
It provides strong layout options (e.g. Grid)
It provides flexible data binding
It provides Styles.

Some links from others.

Jonathan Johansen

@rdipardo Thanks for the suggestions! WPF doesn’t have handles for controls like WinForms, and WindowsFormsHost would do the opposite of ElementHost. Thankfully, ElementHost lets you override the WndProc method (which I do here), so I’ll poke around in there for a bit.

Jonathan Johansen

Update: when I inspect the WndProc messages that come through $"{m.Msg} {m.WParam} {m.LParam}", I note these (mostly tangential, but I’d like to document them):

Pressing ‘normal’ keys (e.g. a-z, arrows, 0-9, punctuation) does not send a message to the ElementHostEx, but instead (after I turned the volume up on my laptop), it somehow triggers a bell sound.
Mouse click comes through with 528 513 36634781 and 33 723656 33619969
Switching to another program sends 8 0 0, and switching back to NPP sends 1024 0 0
Pasting into the TextBox works, but does not trigger any messages. Similarly for copying, deleting and backspacing.
Opening the WPF About window sent 8 1116900 0

I’d like to convert the msg id to a string, I’m not familiar with their values. But there still aren’t that many messages, so perhaps I haven’t set up the dock panel correctly. I’ll try the same thing in the existing Forms version and see what comes up for comparison.