Notepad++ Markdown Highlighting

(Please note, the following and the CSS file were from the original project, and I have not yet modified them to reflect the stylistic changes I made. Feel free to look at the branch indicating the original for the earlier styling or use mine.)

Colors

This style uses Bespin (light on dark) colors. You'll probably have to do some color editing to make it fit your chosen theme -- unfortunately user defined language styles can't inherit colors from their parent theme.

Style Guide

Because of limits of the generic Notepad++ user defined language lexer, highlighting is partial and a little buggy. But you can still get a lot out of it if you follow some simple style rules:

• Use the # syntax for headers, not underlines.
• Remember *, _, and > only highlight the first word they've marked down.
• Use + for lists, or change it in the dialog to dashes. Asterisks will conflict with emphasis highlighting.
• Horizontal rules should be 3 to 13 dashes, no spaces.
• Nothing works if you start or end it inside a word.
• Remember there's no highlighting for indentation/<pre> tags.

How to use

1. Open %APPDATA%\Notepad++ (i. e., \[user]\AppData\Roaming\Notepad++)
2. Replace your userDefineLang.xml with the one in this repo, or add the contents of this userDefineLang.xml to the end of your current one.
3. Restart Notepad++.
4. Markdown highlighting will now automatically apply to .mkdn, .mkd, and .md files, or you can manually select it from the bottom of the "Language" menu.

Extra nerdity

If you like the way this highlighter looks so much you want to read everything in it, there's a css file that lets you do just that.