Question

I have a specific language (its private, and closed source) that I’m writing code highlighting for in Notepad++. I’ve never done anything like this before… so, for the most part, I’m clueless.

There are a bunch of keywords, and I’ve figured out how to implement those, but the strings are denoted by square brackets ([ and ]) instead of normal quotes. How do I register those as strings in the XML file?

Another thing, the language relies heavily on recursion and nesting; is there some way to say “Level 1 of the square brackets is this color, level 2 is this color, etc…”?

Answer 1

There’s a useful help page that explains how to use the GUI to define a custom language for Notepad++. As Alex K noted in a comment above, the option for setting string delimiters appears to be in the Delimiters boxes in the Operators tab. It doesn’t look like it supports different colours for different levels of nesting, though.