The JSON builtin lexer technically does support comment highlighting: the Notepad++ wrapper around that lexer just doesn't expose that option, and it defaults to off.Īs described here, if you use PythonScript, you can use tProperty('',1) in your startup.py to always enable JSON comments, those comments will properly highlight. I would've suggested 'JavaScript' highlighting instead, because Java is a completely separate beast from JavaScript and JavaScript was the basis for the data-exchange-format called JSON ('JavaScript Object Notation', if I remember correctly). Setting the file to use java high-lighting it works actually very good. You cannot just modify a builtin lexer into a UDL. The builtin lexers are completely separate beasts from the User Defined Languages, and are coded individually in C++ by the Scintilla team, then included as part of Notepad++ the UDL is a single lexer that uses very simple parsing to match certain strings for highlighting. I though it would be the simplest to start from the standard JSON and modify that Technically, JSON doesn't allow comments but many people use JavaScript-style comments inside JSON, so much so that it's become de facto allowed.

Notepad++ format json without plugin