I much prefer Notepad++ as my general coding IDE and I have figured out how to get it to work as my external editor for Houdini, but I would love for it to actually have highlighting for the various languages. Especially VEX Snippets, which I am doing most of my work in recently. I suppose I could try to write my own, but I am sure someone else would be much better at it as I have not written my own language definitions for N++ yet. If someone has one, would you be willing to post it?

Yes, I'd love to have one myself. I know it's very “C++”-like. I've been using that language for a while, but would prefer something more specific to VEX.

I use sublimetext3 for this purpose.

It has ‘template’ options to highlight for your language of choice which you can edit.

Since vex syntax is similar to C/C++ you can use one of those templates and add/take away some to customize it for your vex use.

i think MS vscode is better.

I use sublime3 with this add on for Vex, works great

https://github.com/teared/vex [github.com]