Adding syntax coloring for Unreal Script

Original author was Joe Graf (UdnStaff). Tweaked slightly and anonymously for better wikiness. Added regedit hack by Christian M. Buhl (ArmyGameTeam^?). Jack Porter (EpicGames) added the Visual Studio .NET registry file. Maintained by Richard Nalezynski^?.

Visual Studio .NET 2003 (VC7.1)

Download the Visual-Studio-.NET-2003-UC-Syntax-Highlighting.reg registry file and double-click it. Restart Visual Studio.NET. Visual Studio.NET will now perform C++ syntax highlighting on .uc files.

Visual Studio .NET 2002 (VC7)

Download the Visual-Studio-.NET-UC-Syntax-Highlighting.reg registry file and double-click it. Restart Visual Studio.NET. Visual Studio.NET will now perform C++ syntax highlighting on .uc files.

Visual Studio 6

Option 1: DLL Installation

Adding UWHighlighting.dll to MSDev

Simply place the UWHighlighting.dll file in the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\Common\MSDev98\AddIns directory (or wherever your installation is). Then go to the Tools | Customize... menu. Choose the Add-ins and Macros tab. Enable the add-in entitled UWHighlighting.DSAddIn.1.

Step 2: Adding usertype.dat to MSDev

Place the usertype.dat file in the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\Common\MSDev98\Bin directory.

Step 3: Seeing it in action

Restart Visual Studio. Open your favorite UC file and see the Unreal keywords appear in blue (or whatever you have them set to).

Adding keywords

To add a missing keyword, simply edit the usertype.dat file and place the missing keyword on its own line. For instance:

native
...
missingKeyword

Remember to restart Visual Studio to see the new keyword, and please consider updating the file here with your new version (just make a note here in the doc of what you added)!

Option 2: Altering your registry to allow syntax coloring in UnrealScript

As far as I can tell, this does exactly what the DLL is supposed to do. The usertype.dat file is still useful though.

Step 1. Run Regedit

Type regedit in the Run window or from a command line.

Step 2. Find the tag

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\DevStudio\6.0\Text Editor\Tabs/Language Settings\C/C++\FileExtensions

Step 3. Add ;uc to the end of the tag

So the Value data should look something like this: cpp;cxx;c;h;hxx;hpp;inl;tlh;tli;rc;rc2;uc

Other Tools

UltraEdit

UltraEdit is a pretty inexpensive and decent text editor for windows, from http://www.ultraedit.com It reminds some of Visual Slick Edit, but without the crazy pricetag. :)

A UnrealScriptUltraeditWords.txt words file for UltraEdit (version 10) has been attached. To use it simply append it to your existing wordsfile.txt in the directory UltraEdit was installed to. This wordsfile uses language #20 like all the downloadable words files from the UltraEdit web site, so you might have to give it a new language number by editing the first few characters of this file and changing the /L20 into /L13 or some other unused number. You will need to also edit the settings under Advanced/Configuration/FileTypes and add UnrealScript Files(*.uc) to it. You should probably customize the colors under the Syntax Highlighting tab, as the words file includes more categories than the normal scheme handles well (some colors are duplicated like red if you don't customize them).