General Discussion

Suggestion regarding historically significant software release themes

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 23:28:39 GMT

Are both '.7z' and '.zip' portable archives necessary ?

sevem47 — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 07:53:50 GMT

@ThosRTanner said: This doesn’t seem terribly useful for an installation package though. This is exactly my use case: I download the zip archive end selectively extract only changed files. Some of the files in my installation I explicitly do NOT want to get overwritten. In the end it is really just a matter of taste. And I really appreciate the possibility to choose my desired format. From this I support the current situation, that both format are presented for download.

Ctrl-J (join lines) replaces LF with space

guy038 — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 01:39:33 GMT

Hi, @dougk.az, @peterjones and All, Oh, yes, Peter, you’re perfectly right ! But I must be a little tired from this heat wave. Since June 22, in the room where my desk is, even with a fan, the temperature has usually been between 29 °C and 30.5 °C. It’s awful ! BR guy038 Oh ! Now, I also realized that @dougk.az never spoke about the form feed ( FF ) characters, of code \x0C but spoke about the line feed ( LF ) chars, of code \x0A As I said above : really tired by heat !!!

Drag and dropping lines between split view documents?

Michkovy — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 22:53:18 GMT

@PeterJones said: So, sorry, I don’t know of a way to do that. But I am now curious if someone else knows of a way, or if one of the codebase experts knows why it might not be possible (or whether it’s a feasible feature request or not). (I’d apologize for providing a ‘non-answer’ as my answer, when you haven’t gotten a ‘real answer’ first… but I wanted to caution future respondants to not jump to the same conclusion I did at first without actually giving it a try for themselves.) No worries I like to see how people tackle problems. And with a software as vast as N++ where I know only a small percentage of all the functions, even a non answer shows me something new most of the times. Coises answer does the trick. In an ideal world I’d like a way to switch the behaviour so Alt+drag copies, but for all intents and purposes the solution works for me.

Entering Katakana character into find dialog not working

PeterJones — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 13:14:57 GMT

@perdrix52 , It works for me: [image: 1781706853432-2df53d4e-a553-473e-8d32-147c22eb6d7c-image.jpeg] [image: 1781706887521-43e468c4-e3db-4f30-819a-76dfd8e22e8f-image.jpeg] Sounds like a font issue and/or rendering-mode issue to me. What are your settings on Settings > Preferences > Searching (especially Use Monospaced font in Find dialog) and Settings > Preferences > MISC > rendering mode dropdown? And what encoding is your file that contains Japanese text?

Can't Open URL in HTML Link

PeterJones — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 11:24:16 GMT

@Sylvester-Bullitt said: Any idea when the next release will be out My guess: sometime in the next few weeks to a month or so – most of the time, that’s the cadence of the release schedule. But it all depends on when the developer thinks enough things have been added/fixed to warrant a new release. If it annoys you a lot, you can manually download and run the installer for an older version, and use that version which behaves as you want while wait to upgrade again until after you see the next version announced

Print Quality TERRIBLE & Non very useful

karl3200 — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 08:05:05 GMT

@vvPeterJones I switched Settings>Preferences>Print from “No background color” to “Black on white” and the print is much better.

Formatting/Commenting Issue with YML files

PeterJones — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 15:32:26 GMT

@Travis-Young , I cannot replicate your problem: [image: 1781542289284-yamlpaste.gif] When I paste that in, the YAML formats the comments correctly, as far as I can tell. Could you either give the original data, and where you paste it? And your ?-menu’s Debug Info?

How do I highlight text in alternate colors?

Coises — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 09:33:01 GMT

@PeterJones said: Columns++ plugin (though I don’t remember it having the header or full-column highlight, or just a gazillion other features which make column manipulation easier; the author @Coises can chime in at this point). There’s nothing in Columns++ for coloring text. The plugin is helpful if you want to do operations on data in visible columns (like right-justify the entries in a column, add the numbers in a column together, search/replace restricted to a column, do calculations to create a new column, sort on a column in situations that don’t work with Notepad++’s built-in sort) and/or to use elastic tab stops to make maintaining visible columns easier. It doesn’t do any coloring, though. Help is here if anyone wants to examine it to judge whether they might want to install Columns++.

Ctrl not working in 8.9.6.4

Coises — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 06:53:58 GMT

@Emmanuel-PIERRE said: Hello today I see that in 8.9.6.4 on win11 the Ctrl is not working, though in all others app this is fine. I have very few plugins in it (mime tools, npp converter, npp exports) so I guess this is not where it comes from. Shortcuts are fine. any idea ? If you mean that the Ctrl key with a letter that isn’t a shortcut isn’t inserting the traditional control character, see Settings | Preferences… | Editing 2 | Prevent control character (C0 code) from typing into document and be sure it is not checked. If you mean that Ctrl+drag on a selection is not working as it does in most Windows programs, that is a known peculiarity which can be resolved in either of two ways: Press the mouse button down first, then the Ctrl key. or Uncheck Settings | Preferences… | Editing 2 | Enable Multi-Editing (Ctrl+Mouse click/selection). If neither of those is your problem, you’ll have to be more specific.

Important files lost during recent update

PeterJones — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 17:34:12 GMT

@Konsolate said: Everything is lost. Also, while we confirmed with @zack-mosbrucker that the backup folder was empty, you never confirmed that. Are you sure that folder was empty, or did your session file just get reset? (If you don’t know where yours is, it’s probably in %AppData%\Notepad++\backup\ – if it’s not there, share your ? > Debug Info and we can help you find it.) Notepad++ backs up the session file into session.xml.inCaseOfCorruption.bak, so if you still have files in the backup\ folder, then you can recover the old session if you exit Notpead++, rename session.xml.inCaseOfCorruption.bak to session.xml, and restart Notepad++, and it will go back to the previous version of the session file. And if it still doesn’t open all the files from your backup folder, you can just manually open those files from Notepad++, and then save them to a reasonable known location on your computer, so that you won’t lose them again in the future.

Find & Replace & Mark re-organization proposal

shodanx2 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 06:16:52 GMT

@PeterJones I have been having a crack at it. https://youtu.be/UaXvg9w0_O8 [image: 1781246396141-1349f7c1-791f-4298-b47d-df25824aaf10-image.jpeg] I think I can put … everything in it. If I don’t burn out. Absolutely everything, including what you call the “ridiculous proposal”. (Which mostly just adds a preset system for common searches) I have taken care not to use any API after GDI+. And it’s only alpha borders on icons that keep this from being simple win32 GDI.

Folder in Workspace Click on Line Containing File Name

PeterJones — Fri, 29 May 2026 00:16:11 GMT

@Bernard said: this is to request feature id est Folder Workspace responds to clicks on line containing file name if the click is on blank area beyond end of file name . Interesting idea. I see no harm in asking for it. However, this is the Community of Notepad++ users. Our feature request FAQ explains the process for checking for existing requests and adding a new request if it doesn’t already exist.

Cannot open xml files

PeterJones — Sat, 23 May 2026 11:10:24 GMT

@CJBlake1 , Rereading my original response, that came out harsher than I intended. I got interrupted with real life, and had decided to post as-is, before I had a chance to audit my post, so it was too “raw”. What I was really trying to say: I don’t think the specific version of Edge is really relevant to your issue. I am assuming that you used to have XML associated with Notepad++, and then suddenly it wasn’t anymore. Unfortunately, many applications (Edge included) have programmers who think that there software is the only one that matters, and that they should “take back” their favorite filetypes (like XML), regardless of decisions a user has already made. So I’m assuming that some recent update in either Edge itself, or in Windows in general, caused Windows to change (or reset) the default application for the XML filetype. There is nothing that Notepad++ can do to prevent the OS or an overeager application from hijacking the filetype. The best thing you can do in a situation like this is to use the OS tools to re-associate the filetype with the program you want. In Windows 11, the most reliable method for doing that seems to be using the Open With from the right-click menu: right click on an XML file, choose Open With, select Notepad++, and be sure to say, “always use this app from now on”.

New useful plugin (Language Selector)

Abdellah Hss — Thu, 21 May 2026 20:32:32 GMT

GitHub repository: https://github.com/hassaine-abdellah/npp-language-selector PS: I commented the code well so the curious developer can understand how it works.

Thread about the function pane (filtering, search cancel, autowidth, and visuals)

PeterJones — Tue, 19 May 2026 02:08:11 GMT

@shodanx2 said: I have a few observations to make about the function pane and a few improvements to propose. I could not find the keybind, is there one ? Not by default. But like all menu commands, you can assign one with Shortcut Mapper, if you want one. There are more menu entries in Notepad++ than there are keystrokes available, so not every menu entry gets a keystroke. I propose LeftALT+F by default ? As far as I have been able to tell, the way that Notepad++ internally handles shortcuts doesn’t distinguish the left and right alt keys. It’s just “Alt” as the modifier. Unused horizontal space It seems there is this horizontal space, maybe it’s useful in another language, but for me, there isn’t anything useful in that space. Maybe it should be reduced somehow ? That’s the way that treeview controls generally work. I think it would take a huge amount of development effort to customize or re-create oit. X. Function filtering In my language, functions which begin with “" … It would be great to be able to hide functions that start with "”. but have a toggle button to show them if I suddenly need them. Interesting feature idea. I’m not sure how easy that would be to implement. But this would be the first thing you said that I would think would be worth putting in an official feature request. (If you think that this Community Forum is the place to make feature requests, you need to read the Feature Request FAQ) X. Resetting the function search X. function search length has a maximum ! I haven’t used the function search feature enough to be able to comment on those. If other users agree with you on those items, they could each go in as separate feature requests. X. The function search sidebar is somehow, never the right width ! I don’t know why, but I am constantly adjusting the width of the function search sidebar. I don’t know why I can’t just set it once and forget it. Presumably just the right width, I shouldn’t need to touch it again. But somehow, I don’t know what I do, but I do move and resize notepad++ a lot with AltSnap and I end up often having to readjust the function sidebar width. I don’t know that there’s anything the developer can do to fix that. If you are accidentally resizing it, he cannot prevent it. The docking panels are designed to be resizable. And I struggle to hit that narrow width to drag it. Hmm… Do you have a high-DPI monitor? Because on my old-fashioned 100%-scaling setup, it seems to me to be the same width as any size resize control in any windows application. Beside what could be done to automatically have it be “the right size” automatically. “The right size” is meaningless. Everyone disagrees on what that would be, which is why it’s user controlled. Besides, all the docking panels share the same basic control, and everything docked on the right (for example) shares the same width… so what would be “perfect” (in your opinion) for the FunctionList on the right might be too small for the DocumentList (for example) on the right. I suggest these. Make middle-click-drag allow drag-resizing of the sidebar I seem to remember that was suggested elsewhere in the forum, and that someone wrote a script for the PythonScript plugin which could do that. But maybe it was just a related thing I’m remembering. search, search. Okay, this discussion is what I was thinking of (the “move the ‘other view’ separator” portion. I haven’t studied the scripts provided, but if one of them addressses the separator, my guess is that it could be modified to work on the docking-separator instead. X. The function sidebar cannot be docked to the other view separator The docking code for Notepad++ hasn’t been set up to allow “dock to middle” (which would be made more complicated because sometimes the views have a vertical separation when they’re side-by-side, an sometimes a horizontal separation when they are stacked top/bottom). I think there’s already an existing official feature request for dock-to-middle, so you might want to search through the existing features (make sure to remove the “open” filter, because there might be a closed/rejected request) to see if any of the requests about “dock” or similar might already ask for that. But if you cannot find one, maybe I’m mis-remembering (or maybe it was just a user in the Community, who never bothered to put in an official feature request). X. Visual glitching during resize Not a big deal, but the re-paint algorithm is quite sloppy It could be improved Can you be more specific about that? Under what circumstances? What’s your setup like (monitors, DPI, etc… ? > Debug Info is always useful for helping understand your setup)? What do you mean by “sloppy”? Ok, this is everything I had for you regarding the Function sidebar, thanks ! As fellow users, we might be able to talk about it, or commiserate with you. But if there are real problems or real feature requests, you would have to create separate tracking issues for each request, as described in the already-linked FAQ. (Putting a bunch of requests into a single Feature Request issue means the individual sub-requests won’t be properly tracked, and one or more are likely to get lost.) From above, I see two possible feature requests for sure (hide functions starting with _, and dock-to-middle), and another two that are likely reasonable, if someone else can confirm (the two function-list filtering points). I think the “sloppy re-paint” needs to be given more detail before suggesting that a bug report get submitted. But for any feature request or bug report in the official tracker, make sure you search through existing reports/requests (open and closed) before submitting one, to make sure it’s not a duplicate.

New displaying of the "Search Results" panel

guy038 — Sat, 16 May 2026 13:47:44 GMT

Hi, All, From the @pellelin’s post, here is an improvement of my previous post : I now added the complete path of each file , followed with a \ character and the file name ! Once any Search Results panel is displayed : Hit the Ctrl + A shortcut Hit the Ctrl + C shortcut Open a new tab ( Ctrl + N ) Paste the Search Results contents in this new tab ( Ctrl + V ) Run the option Edit > Line operations > Reverse line order ( IMPORTANT ) Now, open the Replace dialog ( Ctrl + H ) Uncheck all box options FIND (?-si)^\tLine\x20+(\d+)(?=(?s:.+?)^\x20\x20(\u:.*\\.+)(?=\x20\())|^\x20\x20\u.+\R REPLACE ?2\2\t\1\t Check the Wrap around option Select the Regular expression search mode Click on the Replace All button Now, re-run the Edit > Line operations > Reverse line order option ( IMPORTANT ) Finally, save this new tab for future study within N++ or Excel ! Now, @pellelin, if you don’t have already the Columns++ plugin installed in your configuration, I kindly advice you to install it ! After installation of this plugin, close and re-open Notepad++ First, run the Plugins > Columns++ > Elastic tabstops option Then run the Plugins > Columns++ > Convert tabs to spaces option Now, in order to right-aligned the line numbers, do the following regex replacement : FIND (\d+)(\x20*)(?=\x20:\x20) REPLACE \2\1 With the same parameters, in the Replace dialog, than above ! For example, I did a search of the word the, whatever its case, in Normal mode, on any .txt file of an USB key Search "the" (77312 hits in 507 files of 590 searched) [Normal] I got an INPUT file of 51,5544 lines for about 10,2 Mb And, after the above process : Reverse line order Regex Replacement Reverse line order Which took 82s, I got an OUTPUT file of 51,047 lines, for about 12,2 Mb, with Complete file path, Line number and Text, all aligned [image: 1780319031552-b25954ec-283c-4b15-9603-bf0d370d3c2d-image.jpeg] Best Regards, guy038 P.S. : In this version, I didn’t report the number of hits. If this information matters too, just ask me about it !

Is a filename legal?

guy038 — Sun, 10 May 2026 07:20:12 GMT

Hi, All, I did additional tests, especially regarding characters allowed with or without quotes ! Although practically any character can be put within a file name when using the rename option of the Explorer, it happens that, under DOS, it is safer to surround the filename with double quotes when you insert most of the allowed symboles So, here is an updated version of my information part : Syntaxes / Chars ALWAYS forbidden : \x00-\x1F " * / : < > ? \ | \x7F : . at the END of file name : SPACE at the END of file name : ALL DOTS file name : PRN AUX NUL : COM1 COM2 com3 COM4 COM5 COM6 COM7 COM8 COM9 COM¹ COM² COM³ : com1 com2 com3 com4 com5 com6 com7 com8 com9 com¹ com² com³ : LPT1 LPT2 LPT3 LPT4 LPT5 lpt6 LPT7 LPT8 LPT9 LPT¹ LPT² LPT³ : lpt1 lpt2 lpt3 lpt4 lpt5 lpt6 lpt7 lpt8 lpt9 lpt¹ lpt² lpt³ Chars allowed WITHIN double quotes : ! % & ' ( ) + , ; = [ ] ^ ` { } ~ : SPACE when at BEGINNING of file name Chars allowed WITHOUT double quotes : # $ - @ _ : . if NOT at END of file name : SPACE if NOT at BEGINNING or END of file name You’ll note that my regex, described in my previous post, allows most of the symbols, even without quotes, as they, generally, can be inserted when using the Explorer ! BR guy038

Facilities to create PostScript hotkeys

PeterJones — Wed, 06 May 2026 10:33:21 GMT

Sorry! It is NOT that I refuse to help you. It is mostly I don’t know how… I asked for screenshots (a normal function of Windows, which I assumed you would know how to grab). I asked for the Debug Info (I told you what menu to go into to get it). You provided neither. Also, I thought telling you that NOTHING showed in " -> Configuration" was self evident and DIDN’T need a screen snapshot? The screenshot would have confirmed: 1) that there really was “nothing” there (maybe you and I have a different definition of “nothing”), 2) whether you had really selected “user scripts” or had selected “machine scripts”, and 3) that you were willing to follow instructions to try to get help. I’m happy to announce I’ve fixed it!!! Don’t ask me how but my WHOLE NP++ setup was weird!!! It seemed half in Program Files and half in AppData. That’s not weird. That’s how Notepad++ and PythonScript are intentionally set up. The FAQ footnote that I’ve begged you to read explains why there are the two different script locations. In fiddling around I copied the PythonScript directory from Program Files into AppData and TaDa! Everything fell into place… EVERYTHING WORKED like clockwork! You thus copied way too much. You could have copied just the scripts. Or you could have just clicked the “machine scripts” button in the dialog, like I told you to, and not had to copy any files. THANK YOU for your responses and help. Glad you’ve got it working.

missing config.xml file?

ModelsRUs — Mon, 04 May 2026 02:37:52 GMT

Thank you Peter. Makes perfect sense. Much appreciated!

New feature: Allow additional line on each search results

Coises — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 13:46:00 GMT

@Alan-Kilborn said in New feature: Allow additional line on each search results: @Coises I can’t tell if you’ve considered this, but one way to do it would be in conjunction with hiding lines. You could hide lines that don’t meet the criterion of -M through +N, where M would be a user-chosen number of lines before the hit, and N a user-selected count of lines after the search match. At first thought, I believe that would be significantly easier to implement than doing it in the search results window. As a plus, it (or a close approximation) could even be available after the search with something like an “expand visible blocks” command. The downside is that Show commands only work on the current document; you can’t show in all open documents (and it wouldn’t even make sense for find in files, whenever I finally get that done). At present, my use of hidden lines (using Scintilla’s function directly) and Notepad++’s way of doing it (keeping its own internal table, inaccessible to plugins, of what ranges are hidden) are at odds with one another, which causes any changes my plugin has made to hidden lines to be lost when any other tab is switched into the view. Thus far, I have not been able to devise any solution to this.

Feature request

PeterJones — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 09:58:31 GMT

@Shobansky , See my longer answer to you here. I’m not sure why you started a new Topic when you were already participating in a Topic about exactly the same thing, and when there was a Topic created 5 days ago that was essentially the same thing. (Also, naming a Topic “feature request” is not helpful to people looking through the titles of the recent posts, because it tells them nothing about the contents of said feature request. Titles should be meaningful if you want meaningful discussion.) Also, since I’m not sure you’ve seen it, our new feature FAQ explains that, while we can talk about ideas all we want in this Community of Notepad++ users, it isn’t an official Feature Request until you follow the instructions in that FAQ to post the Feature Request to the official Issues tracker for the project.

Hopefully Notepad++ can display correctly ...

Athen Carlos — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 11:16:02 GMT

@ioc2e3 said: ioc2e3 Apr 29, 2026, 4:16 PM Hopefully Notepad++ can display correctly … More types of language archives … notepad++ has been holding it down for like 20 years now. underrated.

About ( Ctrl + F ) ...

PeterJones — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 11:04:23 GMT

@ioc2e3 , This is a copy of your GitHub issue. But I don’t think anyone has any clue what you actually want or are asking about. Could you please clarify what you’re asking about? Is it something that only happens if you use that specific localization, or does it happen in English as well?

8.9.4 installation shows error for AppX call

xomx — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 06:29:01 GMT

@Bodenseematze said in 8.9.4 installation shows error for AppX call: I don’t know the exact message Probably(?) the same as in the https://community.notepad-plus-plus.org/post/105358