Using Notepad++ For PowerShell Editing

The style I use has a nice black background...

A while back Thell Fowler (with a little help, and a lot of testing from me) wrote a very good PowerShell Lexer for Notepad++ 5.2 and later… it’s very thorough, has good code-folding, and full support for PowerShell 2.0 syntax highlighting.

I mention this because Notepad++ 5.6 just released yesterday, and it has built-in support for PowerShell syntax courtesy of Scintilla ... but it’s very, very bad. The scintilla PowerShell lexer is probably the most minimal PowerShell lexer I’ve seen (it’s worse than the old “user style” I had created for Notepad++) and has no support for:

• The ` escape character
• Here-strings (which can contain quotes, etc)
• The difference between strings and literal strings and literal here-strings
• The begin/process/end block keywords and Param()
• PowerShell operators (like -is or -gt or -notcontains)
• [System.Namespace.Class]::Method() syntaxes
• Nested $variables inside strings
• Nested $( code blocks ) inside strings (with strings inside those, and …)
• Any of the new PowerShell 2 syntax like:
  • multi-line comments
  • [Parameter()] and [Alias()] and [Validate …. ]

• [CmdletBinding()]

There’s probably more, but I couldn’t be bothered to spend more than a couple of minutes with it. As you can probably guess … all of those features are supported by the external PowerShell Lexer plugin that Thell wrote, so if you’re a PowerShell and Notepad++ user, I apologize for not drawing your attention to our PowerShell Lexer for Notepad++ before .

Incidentally, I stuck a screenshot in this post so you can see how I use it, but there’s one a more complete example of the PowerShell Syntax Highlighting on that lexer download page.

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