@Bob-Wright ,.
I first assumed that when you said,
the notepad++ method of “highlighting” or marking that appearance is basically useless.
you were just trying to be rude.
But then you said,
That functionality you see, the turning the demarcated characters both red, my installation does not display that functionality. Perhaps it is a failure of the “theme” I am using.
So now it looks like you changed a setting, and that then obfuscated a built-in feature, so you genuinely didn’t know that the feature you wanted existed and works out-of-the-box. It’s hard not to assume the worst when a rude / argumentative tone is taken from the start.
Which theme do you use, that it doesn’t show the matching braces? If that’s the default behavior of one of the bundled themes, I will see if we can get the developers to fix that. Without specific details of which theme and which version of Notepad++ you are using (?-menu, Debug Info for full version info), I won’t be able to dig into whether there is something wrong with a particular theme that ships with Notepad++ or not.
the work around CTRL-B
That’s not a workaround. That’s the Notepad++ feature that takes you between braces. And if your settings prevent you from seeing the highlighting, that’s not the fault of the Notepad++ development team – they assume that users won’t change colors in such a way as to make a highlight invisible unless that’s what they want.
If the delimiters were clearly demarcated
They are. Out of the box, with no settings changes, they are a bright red. I don’t know how much more clearly they could demarcate it.
Meanwhile if I have to RTFM to use what should be an intuitive or obvious feature
Anytime you don’t understand or cannot find any feature of a piece of software, the reasonable expectation is that you would read the manual. For Notepad++, I and others have spent dozens (hundreds by now?) of hours improving the manual over the last few years. When you or anyone else comes and says that they cannot be bothered to read the manual, it’s rather a slap in the face.
what should be an intuitive or obvious function
it is. It’s a bold red highlight on both the { and the } in default Notepad++ settings. If that’s not intuitive and obvious, I don’t know what is.
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