@dick-adams-0 said in NPP No Longer Remembers Previous Search Criteria:
Why would NPP think I wanted new documents to start with the letter ell?
It doesn’t.
never saved the new document, so why did NPP keep presenting it with a single letter ell when I launched NPP?  Is that normal behavior?
N++ by default remembers unsaved changes to documents.  Yes, it is normal behavior.  You can change the way N++ handles this so that you get prompted to save/discard any unsaved changes when Notepad++ exits, if you want that behavior.
I’d say what happened was that you somehow “fat fingered” an l into your document, you never noticed it, and it just “hung around” as an unsaved change.  N++ had no way of knowing it was unintentional.