Provide official rust support for Notepad++

Please provide official rust support for Notepad++. It would be really appreciated for windows programmers starting with rust.

1 Like

I feel like there is not much interest in Windows only software.
If you need a Rust IDE and don't need exactly Notepad++, you could look into:

  • RustDT an eclipse plugin. It has code highlighting, code completion(if you have racer)...
  • IntelliJ Rust an IntelliJ plugin. It has code highlighting and pretty ok integration with cargo. It is in active development

And there are many other plugins for text editors(mostly cross-platform text editors), like:

  • Sublime Text
  • Atom
    ...

Actually, now that I remembered, here is a good reference: https://www.rust-lang.org/ides.html

I find this an unfulfilling answer. Notepad++ is by far the most popular editor in Stackoverflows recent users survey. Windows/MSVC is a first-class platform for Rust.

It only makes sense to provide support for the most popular editor.

Here's the thing though: all good editor plugins are voluntary efforts of people who use that Editor all the time. That makes sure they are constantly updated and improved. Maybe some Notepad++ users want to join forces here?

2 Likes

I agree that this does not satisfy somebody's desire to use Notepad++, that's why I say if @soham85 doesn't need exactly Notepad++ but just a dev environment on Windows...
I didn't want to mention that the plugins are voluntary efforts because I don't like myself when in open source projects somebody comes with the response that sounds something like this: "Well, I don't care for that and I won't put effort, but you are welcome to code on this, contributions are welcome", because not everybody has the desire/knowledge/time... to do that.

@soham85, the issue is that this takes a lot of time and effort(to develop and maintain), so people usually don't do it unless they strictly need it.
I would rather a developer work on proving the soundness of some feature in the language than take his time on maintaining plugins for every editor out there(again, it takes some man power to maintain these plugins).

@skade I have yet to see somebody develop entire projects in Notepad++. It is a very good editor to open and look at the code but it was never very friendly at making it a dev environment.
The other modern editors out there are better at accomplishing this task(may be Notepad++ doesn't have a good API for this?).
I do think there should be code highlighting, but that's probably an issue that should be raised directly to the project. I don't know how it works, if code highlighting is maintained by the project or external parties...