• Code Template Fields
• Cleaner visual style for the document tabs
• Added line padding options, allows more whitespace between lines
• Switch to Scintilla’s built-in line length measurement
• Removed some 3D styling bits to clean up the look of the editor, more to do.
• New tab text changed from to Untitled
• -z parameter now assumes a single file after the -z, designed for notepad replacement.
• Updated to latest Scintilla bits for some multi-caret fixes
• Fixed a couple of regular expression issues.
• Fix tools options tab titles.
• Made SmartHighlight more visible, less alpha blending

In case you haven’t used a 2.1 build yet, here are the other headline features in the testing builds:

1. Full Unicode Support
2. Support for Translations – PN in your language
3. Prototype Command Bar feature (with PyPN)
4. Multiple simultaneous selections, including typing into block selections
5. Virtual space

Downloads:

Download 2.1.2 Installer
Download 2.1.2 Multi-language Installer
Download 2.1.2 Portable

Updated Portable download link now, apologies for the confusion!

Programmer’s Notepad 2.0.10 RC is now out, and with that the code has been branched in subversion to the rel-2-0-10 branch.

This means that the trunk is open for big changes again, and there are some relatively big changes on the way – in fact for the next few weeks expect the trunk to be broken fairly often. Here are the changes coming in:

1. Fixing the Unicode build – 2.1 will be released as a full Unicode rather than mixed mode build
2. Updating to the newest Scintilla code, error handling model has changed completely
3. Moving to Visual Studio 2008 SP1 for development instead of 2005
4. Updating Boost to latest release

Apart from this (!) I don’t intend on taking many changes before 2.1 is released. You can see the current suggested list of items to fix in the tracker: Ellington Issues.

The SDK lets you extend PN using C++, allowing you to react to editor events and provide new commands in the menu. PyPN is itself implemented as an extension using this same SDK, and you can use the SDK to provide support for other scripting languages too.

What You’ll Need

You need a Windows C++ compiler and the Boost C++ library. Note that you don’t need to compile any of boost, we use the header-only bits.

I suggest using the free Microsoft Visual C++ Express if you don’t already have Visual Studio, this should guarantee compatibility.

Getting Started

Download the SDK and copy the template project, this is a good base for your extension. Note that the SDK also contains a demo extension showing use of various parts of the SDK. Change the name and version of your extension and you’re ready to add it to Programmer’s Notepad for the first time:

void __declspec(dllexport) __stdcall pn_get_extension_info(PN::BaseString& name, PN::BaseString& version)
{
    name = "My First Plugin";
    version = "1.0";
}

Compile the extension and place the .dll file in your PN directory. Now run “pn –findexts” and your plugin will be discovered and loaded the next time you start PN. Go to Tools->Options->Extensions and see your extension listed.

Everything else you want to do flows from the instance of IPN that’s passed to your init function. This interface gives you access to the open documents, lets you sign up to handle document events and gives you access to app-level services like script registration, find in files and options management.

Working with Documents

Everything you want to do with an open document is done through the IDocument interface. You get a pointer to one of these from your IPN instance by calling GetCurrentDocument, NewDocument or equivalent.

    // Make a new document
    IDocumentPtr doc = pn->NewDocument(NULL);

    // Send scintilla messages (see scintilla.org documentation)
    doc->SendEditorMessage(SCI_APPENDTEXT, 6, (LPARAM)"Hello!");

    // Save changes
    doc->Save("c:\\temp\\test.txt", true);

    // Done with the document
    doc->Close();

This is the first in a series of posts that will become the introductory documentation for extensions. Next time we’ll look at how to add menu commands for your plugin. The series will be added to the docs site as we go: Writing your First Extension

Both provide syntax highlighting and long term access to your snippets. Snipplr also provides an API and several libraries for accessing your code, including python bindings and a wordpress plugin for displaying snippets from snipplr. The design of snipt is cleaner, and more “web 2.0”, but Snipplr seems to have more content and more third-party integration.

The Bumper List of Windows 7 Secrets

I’m loving the multi-monitor keyboard shortcuts, finally! I also think the Black Box Recorder could be extremely useful in getting useful bug reports, both for Windows and for third-party software – like PN!

He linked to an old article I wrote way back when on the Joys of WTL. Fun to see my own words quoted back at me on Scott’s blog! WTL is still the UI framework used for Programmer’s Notepad 2 and in the most part has served very well.

I’d also downloaded the Chromium code to go spelunking into their WTL use having read the excellent post from Peter Krumins’ blog on Code Reuse in Chrome.

Interestingly Google include the WTL code in their distribution, this was something I’d been thinking about doing for PN to reduce the number of steps needed for people to build PN. It would also help with the fact that PN 2.0.9 needs changes currently only available in the WTL Subversion depot.

Sign up for Wakoopa, install a small piece of software and they will track your software use and build up an online profile showing this information. In return they’ll recommend software for you and let you know about new versions. Seems interesting, and you can see a bunch of users of Wakoopa also like Programmer’s Notepad: Programmer’s Notepad on Wakoopa. When I looked, 101 users had clocked up more than 370 hours of usage, across Mexico, Norway, Iran and the Netherlands (amongst many more). Hello international users!

Using Wakoopa reminded me of Ohloh – an open source software tracker. Ohloh concentrates on tracking contributions to open source software, and analyses the source code and commit history for open source projects to build up interesting metrics on each project. Some interesting statistics from the Ohloh Programmer’s Notepad page:

162,795 C++ Code Lines (with a further 29,856 lines of comment)
79,622 C Code Lines (with a further 12,076 lines of comment)

The ratio of comment to code for Programmer’s Notepad 2 is 15.5%, and was only 9.6% for version 1 – clearly I’m getting better behaved in my old age. Statistics are also provided for each developer, and I can see that my Median Commit Rate is 10 commits per month changing 2,200 lines of code – that’s a lot of code for an evenings and weekends project. Of course some of my commits are code contributed by others – don’t want to take all the credit!

You can click the button below to add your support for Programmer’s Notepad at Ohloh:

public class Data
{
[XmlAttribute]
public int SomeNumber { get; set; }
}

class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
using (XmlWriter w = XmlWriter.Create(@”c:\temp\test.xml”))
{
XmlSerializer s = new XmlSerializer(typeof (Data));
s.Serialize(w, new Data { SomeNumber = 5 });
}
}
}

Running this code results in an XML file looking roughly like this (I stripped some unneeded namespace declarations):

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<data SomeNumber="5" />

SomeNumber is saved as an attribute, so the XmlAttribute attribute worked correctly.

Source Analysis has now been released for the whole world to use, for free! The free download is available at the MSDN Code Gallery:

Source Analysis at Code Gallery

There’s also a blog here:

Source Analysis Blog

Here’s what it looks like editing some python code in Programmer’s Notepad 2.0.9 with the Murky theme:

Read more at Damien’s Blog