I’m a huge advocate for using Notepad++ when doing development on windows. It easily beats the default notepad.exe for being function, remains fast, and its “Find in Files” feature actually works instead of the defunct windows-search facilities.
Its menu system is a little bit different from your normal windows application, and working out how to map a specific file extension to a particular format is not exactly obvious. In this case, I wanted to tell Notepad++ to treat build files as XML files. Here’s the steps you need to go through…
Open up the Style Configurator (such a developer name!).
Pick the XML language in the left most window and under the user ext: dialogue (it sits next to the Default ext: , add build as shown in the screen capture below (click on it for a bigger picture). This will now tell Notepad++ to treat files extending with the extension build to format as XML! Viola.
Happy editing.
