One of the things that we showed during the version control presentation at OpenWorld was editing some files was using the open source Notepad++ text editor.

Notepad++ is a great programmer's editor with a whole bunch of cool features that will contribute to your productivity. They go into great detail on their website about them, but I wanted to show a couple here that we can apply a PeopleSoft slant to.

One is the ability to define color-coding rules for your own programming languages. Notepad++ understands numerous programming languages right out of the box; SQL, HTML, Java, .ini files, etc. It doesn't understand things like SQR and PeopleCode though, so we can define our own. Here's what SQR looks like.



It's easy enough to change the color scheme if you don't like the ones that we've put together.

Here's PeopleCode.



We've gone ahead and defined the code folding words for both SQR and PeopleCode. Here's an example with PeopleCode.



In order to use this, you'll need to get Notepad++ and then download our file that defines the syntax rules.

On the Notepad++ download page, you can grab the Notepad++ installer. There's also a section on that page for user contributed language files, which includes the instructions for how to install the user defined languages into Notepad++. If you're feeling so inclined, you can even grab files there for COBOL syntax highlighting :-)

One last cool Notepad++ tip is that you can dynamically select which language rules should be applied to any given file. Normally this defaults by the file extension (e.g. .sqr and .sqc get SQR highlighting), but sometimes there are files that don't have the correct extension for their language.

An example is the .cfg files for the application server and process scheduler domains, along with the backup files that psadmin automatically creates for these. If you open one of these files, and select the "MS Ini" option from the language menu, then you'll get some nice color coding and collapsible sections. Much nicer than psadmin for an editor :-)

Labels: 2007 Oracle OpenWorld Version_Control, PeopleCode, SQR