"Gene Wirchenko" wrote

| and color syntax highlighting. Those are also not typical
| text editor functions. The only functional distinction between
|
| Colour syntax is also used by many programmers.
|

We debated this for days. Now you come back 3
days later to start back at the beginning?

| Personally I would put a code editor in a different
| category from a word processor or plain text editor.
| It benefits from RichEdit functionality but people will
| generally want to save the result as plain text. For
| instance, an HTML file won't work in RTF format, but for
| writing it, RTF text allows one to see color syntax
| highlighting. So it needs to work graphically as a
| word processor but functionally as a plain text editor.
|
| You hardly need to use RTF to have syntax-colouring.
|

Yes, you do. That's what you're not getting. If not
RTF then something similar. Something that provides a
"meta-description" beyond the actual text.

Plain text: apple
Red text in HTML: SPAN STYLE="color: #FF0000;"apple/SPAN
Red text in RTF: \cf1 apple \cf0 [or rather, one possible way]

The HTML and RTF need a specialized display window to
actually show the red color. And they need special encoding,
"meta-text" to store the concept of red characters. It's
not plain text. Notepad++ also uses something like a
RichEdit RTF window. It has to in order to show colored text.
The author of the component that N++ is a wrapper around
says himself that Scintilla is meant to be modeled after
an RTF (RichEdit) component.
And it's also the same for DOC or DOCX. Some kind of
metadata holds the visual description of the text. Plain
text has no visual description. Its just bytes representing
characters.

You're not understanding how an editor actually functions
programmatically. As a result you're just creating definitions
willy nilly: Changing line returns is a word processor function
for you because you don't want it in your code editor. Your
code editor is plain text because you don't want different
fonts or pasted images in your code. But that's just the way
you yourself are using specific functionality.

It's like saying rice is a job for a frying pan. It might be for
you. But if someone thinks rice should only be cooked in a
frying pan then they don't understand how cooking works.

Try rereading the thread.