A Lua Language File for Notepad++

Posted by David Carrigg on March 21st, 2011 in Tools

We all love using Lua to write custom scripts for our game objects, and we also love using Notepad++ to edit those scripts. It basically has everything you'd want in a text editor, plus some.

After hunting on the internet for a bit, we realized that there wasn't a good Lua language file for Notepad++ (at least, we couldn't find one). So we decided to take a little bit of time and create a Lua language file which supports the auto complete feature of Notepad++.

Using this you'll get awesome dropdown boxes as you type built in Lua functions. It'll also show you what parameters you can pass into the functions, as well as the documentation for them.

DOWNLOAD IT HERE!

To use it, follow these steps:
1. Download the LuaLangFile.zip from the link above
2. Extract the lua.xml file into the Notepad++ installation directory, under plugins/APIs. (For me this is in C:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++\plugins\APIs)
3. Open up Notepad++, and go into Settings->Preferences. Under the Backup/Auto-Completion tab, make sure to check "Enable auto-completion on each input", as well as "Function parameters hint on input"

There are a few issues with it at the moment. Firstly, every function is listed as returning void. I couldn't really come up with a good solution to functions which could return different types of data, so I left them all as is. Second, the descriptions for functions with a "." in them (like, math.abs) don't show up. I'm not exactly sure why this is.

If anyone else wants to add to the language file, feel free to post new revisions here or send us an email at info@retroaffect.com as we'll post updates here in the blog.

Happy Scripting!

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