I found a really nice way to make Benzin much more convenient to use. Notepad++ is a text editor with a lot of really nice features, one of which is its NPPExec plugin, which lets you write executable scripts which can be run on files open in the editor. I'm going to show you how to set up Notepad++ to use it with Benzin.

If you don't have Notepad++, you can download it free at here

Now the first thing we want to do is we want Notepad++ to recognize the xmlyt and xmlan filetypes in order to enable syntax highlighting and folding. Click Settings>Style Configurator and then in the far left scrollbox titled Language, select XML. Once you select XML you should see two boxes appear underneath the scrollbox labeled "Default ext." and "User ext." In the User ext. box type "xmlyt xmlan" without the quotes, separated by a single space. Click ok. xmlyt/an files will now be treated as xml files, with all of the nice syntax highlighting and other features that go with it.





Next, we're going to associate the filetypes so you can double-click an xmlyt/an file and have it open automatically in Notepad++. Click Settings>Preferences and then click the File Association tab. Under Supported exts. click customize. A box will appear in the middle of the window. One at a time, type each extension and then the arrow next to it and the extensions will be added to the Registered exts. list.





Ok, now for the real reason for this whole tutorial. First off, open up the Notepad++ installation directory (i.e. C:\Program Files\Notepad++, it should be the folder with Notepad++.exe) and create a new folder named benzin. Copy your benzin binaries here (including cygwin1.dll, but not the .bat file(s)). Now in Notepad++ click Plugins>NPPExec>Execute (or press F6). A dialog box should pop up with a text field a dropdown box and a couple of buttons. Copy and paste the following code into the text area:



Now click the Save button and save as "Convert to .brl*" and then you can click Cancel.

Now you can open up your xmlyt/an files to edit them in Notepad++, and when you want to convert them to .brl, all you have to do is hit F6 (or click Plugins>NPPExec>Execute) and select Convert to .brl* from the dropdown box and click Ok. Once you've done this once, you can just hit Ctrl+F6 to directly execute the last script used as long as Notepad++ is still open (once you close it and reopen, Ctrl+F6 will prompt you to choose a script the first time). Hope this helps make banner writing a little easier for someone else (it sure helped me a bunch!).

To update Benzin, just copy the new exe/dll files into the benzin folder inside of the Notepad++ install directory and you're good to go.

I haven't yet figured out a clean way to convert brl*->xml* using this method but that's something I'd like to do as well (for now I just use the .bat file that came with it when I downloaded it). The easiest but fairly tacky way to do it would involve adding 2 lines to the script to handle .brlyt and .brlan files, but that would involve opening binary files in a text editor, which is not really how I want to go about it...

Anywho, enjoy

clever, I never thought about doing that!

Genuis!!!

What a brilliant thought!

Thats amazing, ive been using this way for a while, another way is to open with and set notepad++ as the default to open xmlan and xmlyt, for me the xml syntax was set by default ( also beyond compare works well for editing, it allows you to see the changes before and after(for simple color changes, you can compare an unedited with an edited and see exactly the differences.)

awesome. a massive help. thank you from the bottom of my nand