@Hunder-Lily ,
I don’t know whether this was a serious post, or whether it was just an attempt to spam the Forum with a video game link because the previous post from 2021 had been a spam to some other site (but not deleted, because the moderators back then weren’t as aggressive at anti-spam as we are now; I have rectified that).
Just so you know, links irrelevant to Notepad++ and the on-topic discussion are not allowed in this forum (especially from brand-new users)
However, if you are serious in this reply nearly 4 years after the discussion ended: Picture this: you are editing your complex code, and instead of closing the Search Results panel, you just click back into your code’s text panel – the same way you would if you were going to be typing new text – and suddenly, F3 goes back to finding the next match, the way you expect it to. It’s almost like Notepad++ (like every other text/code editing app I’ve ever used) is designed to have the keyboard shortcuts apply to the tab or panel that currently has focus. When you think of it that way, Notepad++ is behaving quite sensibly.
Besides, if you are dealing with the Search Results from the Search Results window, then instead of doing an F3 (Find Next), which performs a new search from the current location, you should be using F4 (Next Search Result), which will move you to the next result in the active Search Results – and the F4 key, since it’s dealing with the Search Results, works whether your focus is currently in the Search Results panel or in the file-editing tab panel instead.
And if you, like the original poster, were talking about the Find dialog itself, then you can either move the focus from the dialog to the editing tab, or you can use ENTER (like @Alan-Kilborn suggested 4 years ago)
To sum up:
If you want to deal with the recent results in the Search Results window, then F4 will move to the next result whether you have focus in the text-editing tab or in the Search Results window,
If you want to deal with doing a fresh search with the most recent search expression (for example, if the contents of the file have changed recently), then F3 will work if the editing tab has the focus; and if the editing tab doesn’t have the focus (either because focus is in the Search Results or in the FIND dialog or in some other panel), then all you have to do is switch the focus back to the editing tab before hitting F3, and the focus will stay there through subsequent uses of F3.
None of these options require closing the Search Results panel nor the FIND dialog box, despite the claims to the contrary.
