The schemes are:

1. ASN.1
2. AVE
3. Ada
4. Apache Conf
5. AutoIt
6. Baan
7. BlitzBasic
8. Bullant
9. Csound
10. E-Script
11. Eiffel
12. Erlang
13. Flagship
14. Forth files
15. FreeBasic
16. Inno Setup
17. Kix-Script
18. Lisp and Scheme
19. Lot
20. Lout
21. Lua
22. MMixal
23. Objective Caml
24. Octave
25. Opal
26. POV-Ray SDL
27. PostScript
28. Prolog
29. PureBasic
30. Rebol
31. Scriptol
32. Smalltalk
33. Spice
34. Yaml
35. nnCron

Download from Google Code

The schemes will be linked from pnotepad.org as soon as I get around to it.

I like it a lot, perhaps even more than the Zenburn scheme that’s shipping with 0.9 right now. Wombat will be included with the next release, but if you need it now then you can get it here:

Download the Wombat Preset for Programmer’s Notepad

Simply expand the zip and drop the xml file in your PN\presets directory. Then select Wombat from Tools|Options|Styles and press the Load button. Thanks Matt!

Do you have some colours of your own that you think other people would like? Save your preset and send it to me or post it in the forums!

• Erlang
• Prolog

Content creation, blogging, visual design, news, backend work – there’s
plenty to be done here. I’d like to make the site more useful to PN users,
there are lots of things that would help people that I just don’t have the
time to do. Some brief examples:

Tool integration guides, list of tools you might want to use, extension
writing guide – lots of opportunities.

Releases

Become a part of a release team, help to take a build of PN and get it out
there – some basic testing and willingness to help get PN builds released
more regularly required.

Also looking for people to pipe up whenever they’re using a devel build
that they think is of good enough quality to become stable – I want to
release more often.

Documentation

We now have a wiki that people can enter documentation into. I’m looking for:

1. People to add documentation
2. A willing volunteer to script up the code to extract the wiki contents
   and dump them out as a set of docbook files for the help generator tool.
   I’d prefer Python as that’s my favorite language and is also the language
   the wiki is written in but will take what I can get.

Add-ons

The development release of Programmer’s Notepad supports pre-defined scheme configurations allowing you, for example, to switch instantly to a dark background set of styles. If you have an unusual or well-thought-out set of styles configured then please save them out (see the Save button in the styles options pages) and send them along. Good ones may be included in future releases or made available for download from pnotepad.org.

Do you have a good set of text clips or perhaps the newer code templates? If so then please send them along and we’ll consider them for inclusion again either in the main download or as extras from pnotepad.org.

Lots to think about here, and there are plenty more things to do even if these aren’t up your street. Let me know if you’re interested in helping in any of these ways!

Download Bash Scheme

Download PowerShell Scheme

Download Prolog Scheme

To install these just drop them in the “Programmer’s Notepad\Schemes” directory. Note that due to a bug in the current unstable builds of PN you may need to go into options, view the Advanced page, click OK and then reload PN for these to work. PowerShell and Bash will be included by default with the next release.

ada, adpl, asm, asn1, au3, ave, baan, bash, blitzbasic, purebasic, freebasic, bullant, caml, clarion, clarionnocase, conf, cpp, cppnocase, nncrontab, csound, css, eiffel, eiffelkw, erlang, escript, flagship, forth, fortran, f77, gui4cli, haskell, hypertext, xml, asp, php, phpscript, inno, kix, lisp, lout, lua, matlab, octave, metapost, mmixal, lot, mssql, nsis, opal, batch, diff, props, makefile, errorlist, latex, pascal, powerbasic, perl, pov, ps, python, rebol, ruby, scriptol, smalltalk, specman, spice, sql, tads3, tcl, tex, vb, vbscript, verilog, vhdl, yaml

and here are the lexers already in use in PN schemes:

ada, asm, cpp, xml, latex, matlab, octave, props, batch, makefile, diff, errorlist, pascal, perl, python, ruby, sql, tcl, vb, vbscript, vhdl, hypertext, css

SciTE has properties files that are about the only reference for the styles used for many of these languages. I wrote about this back in December last year, describing the conversion from the scite files to the PN scheme files. Looks like a push to get a whole bunch more of these converted would be a good idea. There is a perl script that needs finishing off that takes much of the hard work out of this.

• there still is manual completion to do after conversion. best case is you just have to finish the styles but it could also be useless keygroup names or worse. nevertheless the output should be a good base at least.
• it currently does not handle “font.” and “colour.” style properties. some of these made PN2 denying the scheme file. the code for this is in the script – it is just turned off.
• all names are extracted from the last comment line before. some property files do not support this concept so the names we get are quite useless or even mis-leading (from far before comments).
• the script cannot deal with property files using multiple lexers. error handling is almost zero in general.

This will be really useful and should help the number of languages supported by PN soar.

Download Sebastian’s Perl script.

Thanks Sebastian!

In other news, I just checked in the code for a Shell Extension for PN2. This allows PN to appear on your shell context menus and work correctly when multiple files are opened. I’ll release this separately before the next full PN release for experimentation (watch this space).

The editing component underneath PN2 is Scintilla, and this includes a number of built-in lexers, the difficulty being that each one has it’s own style keys/numbers and they each need configuring as .scheme files to bring them into PN.

The list of lexers available looks a bit like this (the names are not necessarily correct for these!):

Ada, ADPL, Asm, AU3, AVE, Baan, Bash, Bullant, CLW, configuration files, CPP (thus Java, JavaScript and similar), Crontab, CSS, Eiffel, Erlang, Escript (ecmascript?), Forth, Fortran, Gui4CLI, HTML, Kix, Lisp, Lout, LUA, Matlab, Metapost, MMIXAL, MPT, MSSQL, NSIS, Pascal, PowerBasic, Perl, POV, PS (postscript?), Python, Ruby, Scriptol, Specman, SQL, TeX, VB, Verilog, VHDL, YAML.

That’s a lot more than are surfaced in PN!

I got this list by looking at the Scintilla source code. The way I get all the style numbers for the schemes is to look at the property files that ship with SciTE (the scintilla demonstration text editor). These files have lines like this:

# Default
style.lisp.32=$(font.base)
# White space
style.lisp.0=fore:#808080
# Line Comment
style.lisp.1=$(colour.code.comment.box),$(font.code.comment.box)
# Number
style.lisp.2=$(colour.number)
# Keyword
style.lisp.3=$(colour.keyword),bold
...

Which define some styles for lisp and would translate to:

<style name="Default" key="32" />
<style name="Whitespace" key="0" />
<style name="Line Comment" key="1" class="commentline" />
<style name="Number" key="2" class="number" />
<style name="Keyword" key="3" class="keyword"/> ...

The style.lisp bit indicates that these are styles for the “lisp” lexer, so that then goes in the lexer line in the style configuration:

<lexer name="lisp"/>

Handily, the SciTE config files also include keyword lists and things like that. It’s a matter of a few minutes to translate a SciTE config into a good PN scheme, and the XML for .scheme files is fairly simple so most people should be able to work out the conversion. If you’re trying to do this and get stuck join the pn-discuss list and ask for help.

PN also supports custom scheme definitions (like the VHDL included with PN as vhdl.schemedef). I’ll try and provide some more documentation about this soon.

This was pretty simple, in the scheme file I changed this:

<language name="xml" title="XML" folding="false"...

to

<language name="xml" title="XML" folding="true"...

(note that it’s not that simple for all languages, scintilla needs to provide for folding a language before this flag can be enabled).

The changes will be included in the next release, and in the mean time you can download the modified xml scheme here: WebFiles.scheme

So, given that I’ve wiped that one out, those that requested it please feel free to add another bug to the previous blog entry!