Word-highlighting feature

[pcpro178]

It would be really nice if SlickEdit were to have a word-highlighting feature similar to that of Notepad++, wherein whenever a word is selected all similar (case ignored) words are highlighted.  It would also be good if there were options for exact (case sensitive) matching and a user-defined highlighting color.

Currently, I switch between UltraEdit and Notepad++ as my text editors.  I use UltraEdit only for its fantastic column editor, and Notepad++ is my primary editor simply because of it's built-in feature that allows the user to highlight similar words by selecting any word in an open file.  I find this feature extremely useful and would be hard-pressed to switch to any text editor that doesn't offer it.

[chrisant]

@pcpro178, here are a built in setting and two macros for highlighting the word under the cursor.  Maybe one of them helps.
1.  Tools > Options > Languages > All Languages > Context Tagging > Highlighting and Completion > Highlight matching symbols under cursor
2.  Symbol Highlighting
3.  Highlighting all occurences of text or regular expression with one of 7 colors

[Azethoth]

In most IDE's today if you select some text, all matching sequences are highlighted automatically. Would be nice if Slickedit could not only do that but do it reliably and without having to go through the find dialog.

[Phil Barila]

@Azetoth, it does that.  You just need the cursor on the symbol of interest.  Full, partial, or no selection, all the same.  At least in CUA emulation.

[Tim Kemp]

@Azetoth and @Phil Barila, to get the matching symbols to highlight you have to have the option enabled (Highlight matching symbols under cursor):

[Phil Barila]

Thanks, @Tim Kemp.  I knew there had to be a setting for that, I just didn't want to try to go find it, so convinced myself it was a default in the CUA emulation.  "Yeah, that's the ticket..."
++HP

[JimmieC]

Symbol highlighting is quite useful. However, it can also be a bit distracting at times.

A useful improvement would be the ability to toggle symbol highlighting on/off with the right-click context menu and a pull-down menu entry. The pull-down (or both) would provide the default key binding. That way if the user does not want to use the default key binding, they have the current binding as reference. This way they do not need research the command name to remap it.

Additionally, when selecting text, there is a clash of the symbol highlighting and the selected text highlighting. It would be useful to have the option to configure SE to remove symbol highlighting of a word (or words) if text is being selected. Then when the word is deselected, the symbol highlighting is re-applied.

[rgloden]

Speaking of highlighting items, I would love to see an enhanced version of the SymHighlight macro submitted by marksun officially brought into the baseline.