Syntax Highlighting in Notepad++: How to treat a user-defined language as built-in?

syntax notepad++ autohotkey highlighting
79-madms picture 79-madms · Nov 20, 2013 · Viewed 30.7k times · Source

This is a very minor issue that has nonetheless annoyed me for months. I've spent hours Googling it to no avail.

To enable syntax highlighting of .ahk files in Notepad++, I've downloaded & imported an .xml file for AutoHotkey. The issue is that- to enable this highlighting- I have to manually select it from the "Language" drop-down. I'd like to it to be enabled whenever an .ahk file is opened, as it is for various other languages.

I've tried adding the .ahk extension to the AutoIt language in the Style Configurator, which does nothing for me. Any ideas? I can't be the first person to have been annoyed by this, but I haven't been able to ask Google with any success.

Answer

psxls picture psxls · Nov 20, 2013

It should be working. Check again:

  1. Go to Settings → Style Configurator, select your language and add in the User ext. the ahk extension (without a dot!).
  2. If it's a User Defined Language, then go to Language → Define your language, then select from the dropdown list your language, and in the text box named Ext. that will appear, add your "ahk" extension.
  3. Make sure that the ahk extension is defined ONLY to AutoHotKey, not in two languages simultaneously (so remove the extension from AutoIt).
  4. If it's still not working, check your Notepad++ version. Latest is 6.5.1, previous versions might had a bug.

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