title: Very simple, distributable text editor with customizable syntax highlighting and maybe word completion - nothing else
body: <p>I'm looking for an <em>editor</em> - not an IDE - that has just syntax highlighting.  Word completion would be nice for the keywords I specify as well, but I could give up that feature.  It only needs to be Windows compatible.</p>
  
  <p>The situation is that I have an extremely narrow domain specific language that only has around 25 keywords; it doesn't even have conditionals.  I would like the keywords to be highlighted so that the user knows when they've written a keyword correctly.  And to help ensure that they don't need to specifically memorize each keyword, that's where word-completion would be nice.</p>
  
  <p>I'm going under the assumption that the user has the computer skills of your typical grandparent -- I've easily made syntax files for this DSL in Vim and PSPad, but I feel that those have way too many features to be "usable" for this target audience.  The functionality of Notepad (plus coloring) would be just about adequate.</p>
  
  <p>I'm also open to writing a simple editor from scratch, if there is a library that already does most of the work I've explained here - i.e. I just tell it what to highlight in what color, possibly using regular expressions.</p>
  
  <p><hr/>
  Updates: I've looked at SciTE a bit -- it is very much like what I'm looking for, except that creating the new syntax file (properties file) is becoming quite a hassle. My syntax is rather simple: a short sample script might have the form of:</p>
  
  <pre><code>CommandA
  CommandB Num1 Num2
  
  CommandC
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>It doesn't quite fit into Python or a Basic language, but I'm not going to write a lexer for it either.  But the simplicity of SciTE and its ability to run external programs with the file are two high points.</p>
  
  <p>Notepad++ is decent too -- I think it's a bit too full-featured for the intended purpose, but that's not too bad in itself.  I had already tried setting up a syntax file for it, but I'm having a couple issues that just shouldn't even pop up.  For example, I've chosen a color for the number style.  If I put the number 3, it shows up fine.  If I put 3.0, the .0 part is in the default color, not the number color.  If I do 0x80, only the first zero is colored, let alone the x80; so of course 0xff isn't colored right either.  Also, <code>#</code> is my line-comment character.  If I have a line such as</p>
  
  <pre><code># foo bar
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>the whole line is blue, which is proper.  But if there isn't a space (<code>#foo bar</code>), then the whole line stays black.  My last gripe is that auto-completion seems to only pick up on words already used in the file, not the keywords that haven't been used yet.</p>
  
  <p>Am I missing something obvious with the syntax configuration here?  I've had poor luck searching Google for what I think should be obvious answers in regards to Notepad++ syntax.</p>