Grails with Notepad++ Text Editor

Yesterday, I had to work on a Grails project on my old laptop which was running a fresh install of Windows XP SP3. The laptop is about 8 years old. It had 512mb memory and a Pentium M 1500Mhz. The experience was not very good.

First thing I had to do was to get Java installed. I went to the official website and downloaded JDK 1.6.0_20. I ran the installer and proceeded with the next step.
Next I downloaded the zip file distribution of Grails version 1.1.1 and extracted it to c:\grails.

I added the grails bin directory to the PATH environment system variable and opened a command line console to run: grails

The syntax of the command is incorrect.

To fix this, I created a new environment system variable GRAILS_HOME and set its value to C:\grails.

running grails again i got a different error:

ERROR: Environment variable JAVA_HOME has not been set.

Please set the JAVA_HOME variable in your environment to match the
location of your Java installation.

I did as I was told and created a JAVA_HOME environment system variable and set it to C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_20

Trying to run grails again, I got the expected Welcome message.

When working on a low end machine, there is really no choice but to just use a simple text editor. I chose to use Notepad++ with some minor modifications to the Java language definition file.

<Language name="java" ext="java" commentLine="//" commentStart="/*" commentEnd="*/">
    <Keywords name="instre1">instanceof assert if else switch case default break goto return for while do continue new throw throws try catch finally this super extends implements import true false null as mixin property test using init abs any append asList asWritable call collect compareTo count div dump each eachByte eachFile eachLine every find findAll flatten getAt getErr getIn getOut getText grep immutable inject inspect intersect invokeMethods isCase join leftShift minus multiply newInputStream newOutputStream newPrintWriter newReader newWriter next plus pop power previous print println push putAt read readBytes readLines reverse reverseEach round size sort splitEachLine step subMap times toInteger toList tokenize upto waitForOrKill withPrintWriter withReader withStream withWriter withWriterAppend write writeLine</Keywords>
    <Keywords name="type1">package transient strictfp void char short int long double float const static volatile byte boolean class interface native private protected public final abstract synchronized enum def</Keywords>
</Language>

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