Selected text

[Alan Kilborn]

@RuudSchmeitz said in Selected text:

I don’t use tabs

Smart. :-)
(Although if Notepad++ could to “tab indent space align” behavior, I would be all in favor of tab chars)

and spaces are visible as dots

Yes, in Notepad++
(You were praising the Delphi view, but I don’t see any visible space mechanism there – I guess you were just praising the calming blueness of the selection)

[Ruud Schmeitz]

@Alan-Kilborn said in Selected text:

@RuudSchmeitz said in Selected text:

Yes, in Notepad++
(You were praising the Delphi view, but I don’t see any visible space mechanism there – I guess you were just praising the calming blueness of the selection)

Exactly !
😉

[Alan Kilborn]

@RuudSchmeitz

I just discovered that this bit of Pythonscript magic seems to do what you want for the selection:

editor.setSelEOLFilled(True)

Sample:

Same sample before applying:

[Ruud Schmeitz]

@Alan-Kilborn said in Selected text:

@RuudSchmeitz

I just discovered that this bit of Pythonscript magic seems to do what you want for the selection:

editor.setSelEOLFilled(True)

I’m sorry for the late response : I only saw your 27-Oct-response today .

I added the line editor.setSelEOLFilled(True) at the end of the startup.py file , and it works perfectly !

Thanks Alan !

[Alan Kilborn]

@RuudSchmeitz

Actually, I’ve been using it for a while now, and I tend to like it as well!

[Ruud Schmeitz]

@Alan-Kilborn said in Selected text:

@RuudSchmeitz

I just discovered that this bit of Pythonscript magic seems to do what you want for the selection:

editor.setSelEOLFilled(True)

One last question : where did you find the Pythonscript ?
I’m looking for a way to change the ‘White space symbol’ . Perhaps there already is a Pythonscript to do this .

[Alan Kilborn]

@Ruud-Schmeitz said in Selected text:

where did you find the Pythonscript ?

Not sure I understand the question, exactly.
It isn’t much of a script, it is just a one-liner that mimics the Scintilla command SCI_SETSELEOLFILLED.
If you can elaborate more on what you mean, I’ll certainly try to answer…

I’m looking for a way to change the ‘White space symbol’

I don’t think you reasonably can do this.
What’s wrong with the existing one?
What would you change it to?

[Ruud Schmeitz]

Not sure I understand the question, exactly.
It isn’t much of a script, it is just a one-liner that mimics the Scintilla command SCI_SETSELEOLFILLED.
If you can elaborate more on what you mean, I’ll certainly try to answer…

I clicked on the link , and the Scintilla-page sort of answers my question .
This is new to me . Are all those Scintilla-commands available for Notepad++ ?

I don’t think you reasonably can do this.
What’s wrong with the existing one?
What would you change it to?

The dots in the middle of the space-character can be a bit confusing . Changing the color of the White space symbols is not always enough .
I would rather have (a small version of) the underscore as White space symbol .

[PeterJones]

@Ruud-Schmeitz,

where did you find the Pythonscript

All the PythonScript commands are found in the Plugins > Python Script > Context-Help which is bundled with the PythonScript plugin; that menu command opens a local set of HTML files in your default web browser; in the table of contents on the left, the Notepad++ Object and Editor Object pages will be the ones you use for finding out what goes with notepad.* and editor.*

I’m looking for a way to change the ‘White space symbol’

As far as I can tell, it’s not a “symbol”, per se. SCI_WHITESPACESIZE calls them “dots”. The size is 0 for invisible, or 2 when you turn on viewing whitespace. But when you change the size, using the PythonScript editor.setWhitespaceSize(size) command, you see that it’s likely not a symbol/character; it appears that PythonScript is drawing a size ✕ size square – and if you set size bigger than about half the font height, the “dots” start blending together.

So if your goal in changing the “symbol” is to make them slightly bigger, you can just use editor.setWhitespaceSize(size) to change the dimensions of the “dot”.

Otherwise, you can use SCI_SETREPRESENTATION through editor.setRepresentation(' ', 'SP'), and it will change the visual display of the space character to SP in a black box. Change the 'SP' to a string containing whatever black-boxed character(s) you’d like to see. (This is technically not part of the view-whitespace setting; however, it accomplishes the goal of changing what you see instead of the dot.) If you want to undo this change, use editor.clearRepresentation(' ')

[Ruud Schmeitz]

@PeterJones said in Selected text:

All the PythonScript commands are found in the Plugins > Python Script > Context-Help which is bundled with the PythonScript plugin; that menu command opens a local set of HTML files in your default web browser; in the table of contents on the left, the Notepad++ Object and Editor Object pages will be the ones you use for finding out what goes with notepad.* and editor.*

I tried your suggestion , Peter :
Plugins > Python Script > Context-Help

but instead of the PythonScript commands , I got this error-message :

Despite the error-message , the folder does exist !

So I double-clicked on file index.html in folder :
C:\Program Files\Notepad++\plugins\PythonScript\doc
and got the information you described .

I’m not sure what caused the error . It could be the space in C:\Program Files… .

[PeterJones]

@Ruud-Schmeitz ,

It looks like it’s building the path incorrectly, with the c:\program files\notepad++\ portion twice in the path, which isn’t going to work.

You might want to go to the PythonScript repo and report that as a minor issue.

[Ekopalypse]

@Ruud-Schmeitz

May ask you how you installed PythonScript plugin and which
version you are using (either use about from the menu or the
output from the console)?
I remember seeing this strange path in an older version of PS,
but should be fixed already.

[Ruud Schmeitz]

@Ekopalypse said in Selected text:

@Ruud-Schmeitz

May ask you how you installed PythonScript plugin and which
version you are using (either use about from the menu or the
output from the console)?
I remember seeing this strange path in an older version of PS,
but should be fixed already.

This is how I installed Python Script :
• start Notepad++
• in menubar , click on Plugins
• in list , click on Plugins Admin…
• in list , select PythonScript
• click on Install

and this is the version I’m using :

[Ekopalypse]

@Ruud-Schmeitz

Thanks, yes, that is the latest stable version.
Hmm strange - I’ll have to do some tests.

[Ekopalypse]

@Ruud-Schmeitz

Seems to work for me.
Can you do me another favor and post your debug-info
which is available from the last menu entry, the ? menu?

[Ruud Schmeitz]

@Ekopalypse said in Selected text:

@Ruud-Schmeitz

Seems to work for me.
Can you do me another favor and post your debug-info
which is available from the last menu entry, the ? menu?

The requested debug-info :

[Ruud Schmeitz]

This post is deleted!

[Ruud Schmeitz]

@PeterJones said in Selected text:

Otherwise, you can use SCI_SETREPRESENTATION through editor.setRepresentation(' ', 'SP'), and it will change the visual display of the space character to SP in a black box. Change the 'SP' to a string containing whatever black-boxed character(s) you’d like to see. (This is technically not part of the view-whitespace setting; however, it accomplishes the goal of changing what you see instead of the dot.) If you want to undo this change, use editor.clearRepresentation(' ')

Like I wrote before , I’m looking for a way to use (a small version of) the underscore as White space symbol .

In the Python Script documentation :
file:///C:/Program%20Files/Notepad++/plugins/PythonScript/doc/scintilla.html#scintilla-methods

I found 3 promising Python Script commands to achieve this :
editor.setRepresentation(encodedCharacter, representation)
editor.setWhitespaceFore(useSetting, fore)
editor.setWhitespaceBack(useSetting, back)

Then I did some testing (I used ‘-’ instead of ‘_’ for testing purposes) .

Original code :

Script 1
editor.setRepresentation(’ ', ‘-’)
editor.setWhitespaceFore(1,( 64, 64, 64))
editor.setWhitespaceBack(1,(255,255,255))

Result after running Script 1 :

• the first command has been executed
• the second and third have been ignored

Script 2
editor.setWhitespaceFore(1,( 64, 64, 64))
editor.setWhitespaceBack(1,(224,224,224))
editor.setRepresentation(’ ', ‘-’)

Result after running Script 2:

• the first and second command have been executed .
• the third has been ignored .

I’m obviously doing something wrong .
Are those commands commands mutually exclusive ?

[Alan Kilborn]

@Ruud-Schmeitz

A bit off the trail of this thread now, but when you said:

The dots in the middle of the space-character can be a bit confusing . Changing the color of the White space symbols is not always enough .
I would rather have (a small version of) the underscore as White space symbol .

My reply to that is: I don’t know if you’ll be able to achieve something for this that isn’t overwhelmingly intrusive.

I thought of maybe a “squiggle” like spell-checker plugins use for misspelled words; could be the best thing (IMO) here, but it seems like that would make knowing how many whitespace characters are there a bit difficult…

[PeterJones]

@Ruud-Schmeitz said in Selected text:

Are those commands commands mutually exclusive ?

Effectively, yes. Because the setWhitespaceX commands affect the dot-drawing; when you have a representation for the ASCII space character, then it is not displaying the dot-drawing, it is displaying that character in the black-box reverse-video representation. I don’t think there’s a way to manually define the black-box stylings, but I could be wrong.

As to why your script 2 was still showing the whitespace dots rather than the black-box representation, I don’t know… maybe there was a typo (since you just pasted the code in the forum, rather than using the </> button to mark the code as plain text, the forum changed ASCII single-quotes into “smart ‘quotes’” some of the time, and I don’t know – maybe you had a syntax error in script 2 that you didn’t notice the error message for.

So, I think your choices are

1. Use the representation to set the black-boxed hyphen or underscore as the display character of choice for the space character, but give up on independent control of the color
2. Use the “dot” drawing with whatever colors you want, and maybe choosing a bigger size to make it slightly more like a small horizontal rectangle
3. Apply the squiggle, like Alan suggested
4. Rather than squiggle, maybe you could apply a normal underline feature to the normal space character – you can add extra highlighting to a builtin lexer or to a User Defined Language (UDL) using regexes via the script EnhanceAnyLexer.py that @Ekopalypse shares in his github repo. I am not sure, when using the “indicator” method that Ekopalypse shows, whether you can influence the underlining property of the match, but I would think so; if so, and you did a regex searching for the space character and applied that indicator, that might do what you want.

I don’t know whether any of these solutions are going to make you happy, but I think they are your best options.