I am attaching a screen shot of the prototype of the Highlight tool window SlickEdit plans on adding for the next release.
Some quick explanations:
1) Profile: Sets of words/expressions to highlight can be stored in the user configuration (user.cfg.xml), you can switch between them here, there will also be a handful of simple highlight profiles bundled, like Errors and Reminders, etc.
2) Adding words: It will highlight words, substrings, or regular expressions, you can just type in a list of words here and they are added to the list, hit ENTER and they are committed to the list. A double-quoted string is interpreted as a substring, an expression in slashes is interpreted as a regular expression, anything else is a word so long as it only contains word characters. Strings can use \ escape sequences to embed a double quote or a tab character. Regular expressions can use \/ to embed a slash.
3) The word column of the tree control will be an editable text box if you need to make corrections.
4) The Kind and Case columns will be combo boxes so you can change options.
5) The options area can be collapsed like other Tool window options areas.
6) You can select one of six highlighting styles, the default is Reverse colors, but you can also do Bold, Underline, Strikeout, Plain, and "Highlight" which just uses the background color defined for the "Highlight" color.
7) The colors used are part of the color profile, there is a new palette of 64 colors, so this "just works" with different color profiles.
8 ) You can also select to have it draw a box around the text (like SymHighlights does by default).
9) It can also create markers in the scrollbar markup area for the matches.
10) The coloring algorithm works a lot like symbol coloring, doing the current visible page, and then incrementally painting the rest of the document, this way it can scale to handle very large documents. It will be configurable, like Symbol Coloring, to do only the current file, all visible files, or all open files.
This is a prototype. I have a lot of work to do to clean this up the rest of the way and make it production ready. I plan to implement most of the same (or directly compatible) commands like SymHighlights has for adding the word under the cursor, clearing highlights, toggling case sensitivity, toggling enable/disable for a words, cycling colors, etc.
I would have just sent this as a PM to JP and marksun, to continue our dialog, but the private messages do not let me attach an image.