Thus far I’ve done all of my Erlang development on Fedora using vim or KWrite (which does a decent job in Ruby mode).

But today I found myself on a windows box and wanted a basic syntax highlighting editor for Erlang that was free and worked on Windows. Oh – and not Eclipse+Erlide. I wanted something small and fast.

I grabbed the “free as in beer” and “free as in speech” editor NotePad++ and created a simple syntax file that is a bit hokey but will serve my needs fine.

Here’s a screen shot …

NotePad++ has pretty weak syntax highlighting but was sufficent to do most of what I wanted.  Some regex based rules would make this a more robust.

Highlighted entities include

• Erlang reserved words (and named operators)
• Variables
• Atoms
• function names (same coloring as atoms)
• Operators
• Comments
• Kernal, stdlib, mnesia and odbc modules.
• Support for *.erl, *.hrl and *.htp extentions

I’ve probably missed several things.

Looks a lot better than nothing and it took all of 10 15 minutes.

If you are using NotePad++ here is the file:

http://www.roberthorvick.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/erlangSyntaxDefinition.zip

And here are the instructions on how to install it:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/notepad-plus/index.php?title=Syntax_Highlighting_Sharing

And here’s the instructions on modifying or creating your own:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/notepad-plus/index.php?title=User_Defined_Languages