Syntax highlighting with Notepad++

It is fairly straight forward to set Notepad++ as the default program to open/modify your *.content and *.template files. Further if you go to Settings -> Style Configurator... then select language HTML you can add content template to the User Ext: text box which will then have Notepad++ automatically use html syntax highlighting for all *.content and *.template files (pretty nifty!).

Windows installation using Chocolatey

You can install Nift on Windows using Chocolatey. First install Chocolatey, then follow the instructions here, or alternatively enter:

choco install nift

You can find compiler options including building with a normal version of Lua on the documentation page for make.

To uninstall Nift enter choco uninstall nift.

Windows installation from executable

Download the latest Windows.zip from releases then place the extracted versions of lua51.dll, nift.exe and nsm.exe anywhere in your user's path, eg. in C:\Windows\system32.

Installing Nift on Windows from source using Command Prompt

Download nsm-master-*.zip, then follow these steps to compile and install:

1. Install GnuWin32 (Make for Windows) [or choco install gnuwin] and mingw [or choco install mingw];
2. Open both a Command Prompt window and a Command Prompt (Admin) window (right click command prompt and select run as administrator);
3. Enter path=%path%;C:\Program Files (x86)\GnuWin32\bin; in to both command prompts to add make to your path;
4. In both command prompts change directory to where the nsm source code is;
5. From the regular command prompt enter make;
6. Move nsm.exe and nift.exe to somewhere in your user's path, eg. C:\Windows\system32;
7. Delete both the file nsm-master-*.zip and the directory nsm-master-* containing the uncompiled/source code.

Note: See here for information about the variables you can pass to the Makefile when compiling Nift.

Uninstalling Nift

Should you ever want to remove nsm from your machine, delete nsm.exe and nift.exe from wherever you installed them.

Installing Nift on Windows from source using Git Bash

Installing a c++ compiler

If you do not already have a c++ compiler then you will need to install one.

On Windows I typically just use code::blocks which you can get to download/install with MinGW as the c++ compiler.

Installing Git Bash, mingw and make

1. Go to here;
2. download make-version-without-guile-w32-bin.zip (get the version without guile);
3. Extract the contents of the zip file;
4. Copy contents to Git/mingw64.

Installing Nift

1. Extract nsm-master-* from nsm-master-*.zip;
2. Open a Git Bash window (right click the desktop for example) and change directory to ~/Downloads/nsm-master-*;
3. Compile nsm by running make;
4. Install nsm by running make git-bash-install (note - you may need to open a new terminal window for nsm installation to be recognised);
5. Delete both the file nsm-master-*.zip and the directory nsm-master-* containing the uncompiled code.

For example, if you unzipped nsm-master-* inside your downloads folder, then steps 1-4 are achieved by entering the following into your terminal window:

cd ~/Downloads/nsm-master-*
make
make git-bash-install

You should now have a functioning version of nsm installed on your Windows machine.

Uninstalling Nift

Should you ever want to remove nsm from your machine, either run make git-bash-uninstall from the source code directory or run sudo rm -f ~/bin/nsm ~/bin/nift from any Git Bash terminal window.