Maximum PC

I use Notepad++ (it or UltraEdit are company enforced choices--please for the love of all that's holy none of those "But you should try ___!" posts).

I frequently work with lengthy boolean text strings. Needless to say, the nesting can get deep. Notepad++ will highlight an unbalanced parentheses if you have the cursor next to said parentheses. What it doesn't do (at least not the stock version anyway) is highlight bad parentheses no matter where your cursor is. Does anyone know of a way to get the program (or UltraEdit v16--the one we have licenses for) to light up bad/unbalanced parentheses automatically?

No, and I'm not aware of any text editor in the world that does this. It probably has to do with the fact that braces are not considered anything important in code, unlike a keyword. Not to sound mean, but if you have unbalanced braces everywhere, you should get into the habit of completing them as you create them to avoid this problem.

Also if you have bad nesting (which personally I consider anything beyond two levels bad, beyond three you should be whacked upside the head), you should rethink your conditional statements/logic/program flow etc.

LOL what?


There is a "bad bracket" style in the style settings, try playing with that.

Bad Brace color/style only applies with the "cursor next to the brace in question." However, I am going to see about radically changing the font for a bad brace so a quick arrow-key-through will easily show unbalanced braces.

i.e., not a keyword or variable name. Not to mention every time you type something in the editor, it has to reparse for bad braces if it were to highlight bad braces automatically. Besides that, if you're using a compiler, it'll tell you if you have a bad brace (not sure for straight interpreted languages). Either way, make it a habit to close braces when you open a new one up before doing anything else. You won't run into this problem as much.