At work we use TextPad as a general-purpose text editor for Windows. It’s not even close to TextMate on Mac OS X but it’s a welcome help in the Notepad world.

TextPad uses syntax definition files for syntax highlighting. As I’m writing lots of Freemarker template files at the moment I could use some color coding to make my life easier. Feel free to download the syntax file if you need some color in your Freemarker templates.

Installation

1. Download the Freemarker syntax definition file.
2. Save the file in the “Samples” subfolder in your TextPad installation folder.
3. Open TextPad and choose “Configure → New Document Class…”.
4. Specify a name for the class and the extension (*.ftl in our case) and
5. enable syntax definition highlighting and choose the freemarker.syn from the drop-down list.

Open a new Freemarker template file and it will be nicely color coded.