@rdipardo I just ran into this when I tried pasting a webpage of emoticon codes into a new installation of Notepad++ and was very surprised and pleased to see them rendered in color! In my daily NotePad++ they always look like line drawings. I tried playing with preferences but didn’t figure it out, so I Googled it and found the AI summary told me how to enable direct write to achieve this. Apparently when I installed my NotePad++ GDI was the default, but now it’s DirectWrite that is the default! Hooray! 😀

@James-Wisecup-0 said:

Maybe it’ll be a feature in the near future .

Likely not.

@Greg-Wille ,

There’s a workaround: if you use Window > Sort By > Content Length Ascending/Descending, it will sort the tabs by content length, which also sorts the Document List.

Because that sort feature exists through a different menu, it’s not likely that the developer would add it to the Document List panel as well (and it’s guaranteed that it won’t happen if you only have a post here, because as our FAQ explains, this is not the place for feature requests).

It appears that in my collection of fonts, Text is a variant like Thin, Medm, Bold, etc., because it works as expected with the rendering mode set to GDI instead of DirectWrite.

I don’t know if the font collection was repackaged on Google and Text was corrected,

Like I said, Google fonts doesn’t have the Text variant: I had to get that from fontsquirrel

perhaps it’s still mispackaged internally to IBM, so that it fails for me.

I doubt that’s it.

Thanks for your time, it’s greatly appreciated. (Not that it matters any more, but I’m on Windows 11 and my debug info follows.)

Well, there goes my Win11 theory. :-(

Scintilla Rendering Mode: SC_TECHNOLOGY_DIRECTWRITE (1)

… so this was taken when you were still in DirectWrite.

Display Info:
primary monitor: 3840x2400, scaling 300%

Ooh, that’s interesting. Maybe it’s a high-DPI issue. (Notepad++ still has some pretty weird bugs when you have a high-DPI monitor. Something specific to the Text version of the font might trigger one of those.)

But, anyway, if GDI works for you, that’s great. (Just be warned that in GDI mode, if you try to use an emoji or other glyph that’s not in your font, Windows might not be able to display the character from another font, like it can when you are in DirectWrite mode.)

@Shin-ichiroh-Sakagami ,

I just created a text file (Language > None (Normal Text)) with ~16M copies of the line this is just one line, with 1 in 1024 having -- with extra appended to the end.

When I search forward or backward for extra (SearchMode=Normal, not Regular Expression), it takes the same amount of time to search forward or backward. It’s definitely slow – as is everything when dealing with 10M lines – especially for Ctrl+HOME or Ctrl+END, but I don’t notice any difference between forward and backward search.

You might check your Settings > Preferences > Performance settings, and see if any of those help. If your log file is being syntax highlighted, you might want to change the performance threshold so that it’s not syntax highlighted, and it might speed up.

(If you were using Regular Expression search mode, and you had done the power-user config to allow backward regex, you need to know that backwards regex are not as efficient as forward, because the regex engine wasn’t optimized for backwards search.)

@Dinh-Duc-Nguyen
What do you mean by “large”? If you mean “hundreds of MB”, it’s not uncommon for Notepad++ to become unresponsive for a few seconds while it’s loading the file.

Also, it would help us diagnose your issue if you shared your debug info (?->Debug Info... from the Notepad++ main menu).

@PeterJones said in Need clarification about "built-in" language lexers:

So I asked ChatGPT why,

Why would you believe that atrocity?

It was probably an off-the-cuff question, but I figured I’d take it seriously. I know that this is going off-topic, so feel free to cull this response if you like.

To tweak the old Russian maxim, it’s very much a case of “distrust until verified” (which is why I posted my question instead of just swallowing what the thing spit out.

I’m not particularly a fan of them, and I honestly believe that in time, we (as in humanity) may come to regret their invention and our likely inevitable overdependence on them.

But I’m also not an ignorant neophyte. I’m actually very well aware of the limitations and problems with LLM’s, probably more than most people, and despite that, I’ve found them to be useful in some contexts.

First, you’re not wrong to call them “random text generators,” but that really is an oversimplification. It’s not just a flat index of word frequencies. Tehy’re trained with billions (or even trillions) of parameters that encode patterns across syntax, semantics and reasoning heuristics. From a purely mathematical point of view, it’s actually pretty intersting. But saying it’s “just statistics” is a bit like saying the human brain is “just firing neurons.” Yeah, it’s technically true, but it misses the interesting part.

So yes, because they are probabilistic sequence models, they are perfectly capable of fabricating “facts” (i.e., hallucinations, especially with multi-dimensional requests or as the context window gets filled up), making overgeneralizations like missing edge cases, or have issues with compression bias, shallow chain-of-reasoning (although this one is getting a little better), ambiguity drift, context inference biases, fidelity drift when repeatedly iterating through details, context window size limitations for long conversations, etc. I have some experience dealing with each of these limitations to some extent.

So I know all that going in, and since I do, I know not to rely on them as primary sources, and also how to account for many of those problems and a number of strategies to somewhat limit and mitigate the problems (e.g., authoritative source anchoring, chunking, forcing tabular output, explicitly prompting for blanks instead of it making guesses, etc). If I’m doing anything serious, I’ll use all the tools at my disposal, but I still know that if the output isn’t testable, it’s not trustworthy and I know not to rely on it for expertise; it’s just a tool I use to speed up my info gathering. I think of it as supplementary rather than authoritative.

So it’s an occasionally useful tool that’s saved me some time by giving me a starting point to quickly gather ideas and point me to things I might not have thought of before I check with reliable sources (like you) that can actually confirm or invalidate them.

I don’t expect to change any minds about it, and in truth, I don’t really even want to, but you always take the time to thoroughly answer people’s questions, and I wanted to respect that in turn.

@PeterJones That fixes everything! Thank you so much! Apparently I need to be better about updating N++ plugins.

@Augusto-Cesar-Santini ,

Under normal circumstances, TypeScript is not “blank”:
f4dfe6ae-b151-473c-bac9-4dbd1800cd34-image.png

What Theme are you using? Default (stylers.xml) or one of the other Themes?

Please note that themes and stylers.xml aren’t updated automatically when you update Notepad++, so your theme might be out of date, as described in the themes section of the user manual . But some themes, even fully up-to-date, are missing many of the Languages that stylers.xml or the DarkModeDefault theme provide. In that case, I recommend using Plugins > Plugins Admin to install the ConfigUpdater plugin, which can find any languages that are missing from your theme and put in dummy values; after a restart of the app, there will at least be entries, even if the colors aren’t the best or necessarily distinguished from each other.

@jeddahcpu said :

I can’t make text from right to left in new versions

@Coises Thanks

Hello, @h-jangra, @peterjones and All,

Peter, I suppose that the @h-jangra’s project is defined in :

https://github.com/h-jangra/NppVim

And that his first release can be donwloaded from :

https://github.com/h-jangra/NppVim/releases/tag/v1.0.0

Of course, I have not tested this plugin yet !

Best Regards,

guy038

@Coises said in Can't print with notepad++:

I’d say No Background as the default,

Congratulations. That’s the default already.

And, as you say, the warnings probably aren’t worth the effort.

have a separate theme for printing which doesn’t change when you change the display theme

Ick. As I said above, that breaks the expectation set up by literally every other application I can think of having printed from in the last decade or two. If the visual area has color inherent to the display, the general expectation, in my experience, is that it will print in that color… not some other set of colors which I have to pick or set somewhere other than my primary color choices.

Printing of text files to dead trees should be rare enough that most people don’t care; printing to PDF, you want the color to match exactly. Since Notepad++ cannot tell which you are doing (it’s the OS, not the app, that knows what printer you send to), there’s another reason to not have a separate printing theme or other such workaround.

People getting colors the same between screen and print should be the default; anything else breaks reasonable expectation. (Even “no background” being default breaks that expectation, IMO.)

I’m interested in having sticky tabs, ie, tabs that will stay on screen, regardless of how right or left you scroll in your tab bar. I could use multi-line tabs, but that takes up vertical space. This is kind of like freezing columns in Excel.

Hello,

Thanks a lot for your great and swift answer

@xomx
Note, in above, STR means “Steps To Reproduce”.

@Adam-Fradley ,

Further, if I start from an 8.8.2 portable, with the config.xml modified per my previous explanation, it does see the new version, and says,
190611e6-3c44-4fe7-8b3c-9dc94014baf8-image.png

But it DOES NOT start downloading unless you tell it to.

If you are not getting that dialog, then it’s not Notepad++'s gup.exe updater that is trying to do the download, and you need to look for your culprit elsewhere.