Seems that SysInternals Process Explorer does the trick.
This is thread’s call stack:
Clearly the DSpellCheck is the evil. I disable it and there is no hangs until now.

ntoskrnl.exe!KiCpuId+0xaa
ntoskrnl.exe!ExAcquireSpinLockExclusiveAtDpcLevel+0x2c2
ntoskrnl.exe!KeWaitForSingleObject+0x1a3
ntoskrnl.exe!ExReleaseResourceForThreadLite+0x60
ntoskrnl.exe!KeInsertQueueApc+0x725
ntoskrnl.exe!ExAcquireSpinLockExclusiveAtDpcLevel+0x4cd
ntoskrnl.exe!KeWaitForMultipleObjects+0x272
win32k.sys!memset+0x7c97
win32k.sys!memset+0x7d59
win32k.sys!EngFntCacheLookUp+0x1747b
win32k.sys!memset+0x6c9e
win32k.sys!EngFntCacheLookUp+0x60b0
win32k.sys!W32pArgumentTable+0x3818a
win32k.sys!EngSetLastError+0x7f
win32k.sys!EngSetLastError+0xd836
ntoskrnl.exe!longjmp+0x5b93
USER32.dll!IsDialogMessageW+0x20a
USER32.dll!UserHandleGrantAccess+0x4020
DSpellCheck.dll!isUnicode+0x55ed2
DSpellCheck.dll!isUnicode+0x3bae
DSpellCheck.dll!isUnicode+0x35cb1
DSpellCheck.dll+0x4a1d
DSpellCheck.dll!beNotified+0x98
Notepad++.exe+0xd7fe6
Notepad++.exe+0xd7ede
Notepad++.exe+0x8e94a
Notepad++.exe+0x12fc4e
Notepad++.exe+0x13e35f
kernel32.dll!BaseThreadInitThunk+0xd
ntdll.dll!RtlUserThreadStart+0x1d

@dinkumoil said:

Session file ext. and define a file type. The image below shows that I’ve choosed nppssn.

Cool, I didn’t know that’s what those preference fields were for. I’ve added that tidbit to my TODO list for the preferences documentation update.

One benefit of my method vs yours (or of combining our two methods: using the same extension in both registry and Session file ext) – mine allows adding the -multiInst flag, so that if you’re normally in single-instance mode, but want to open multiple sessions simultaneously in separate instances, it will not work with always-single-instance mode. Oh, that’s what “open session in a new instance” is for. More clarifications to make in docs.

Looks like I have enough TODOs in that file that I should be making a preferences-documentation pull request as soon as I have time. :-)

@ThiloL

Our advice on that is to start here.

@David-Caylor said:

Sorry if this is the wrong area

It is. The official bug reporting area may be found via this link: https://notepad-plus-plus.org/community/topic/15741/faq-desk-feature-request-or-bug-report

But of course it is ok to discuss suspected bugs here first.

I think you might be a victim of a “catastrophic” regular expression situation.

Try this, which may (or may not) be equivalent to the Replace All operation you’ve described, but for purposes of illustration it might be valid: Without changing anything else about your setup, change to the Mark tab of the Find window, then press Mark All. Notice that all of your text will be marked with a red background (indicating what matched), including ANNUAL_SALARY, which sanity says your regular expression should not match.

Now have a look here: https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issues/4761 and do some reading…

What it comes down to is that you should write a better regular expression to match your data. Perhaps \d+\R as a suggestion for your Replace All operation. Maybe I would do something different from that, but I don’t know what you are really trying to accomplish; I think your example is just that, an example, and your real task is hidden from us – that’s okay, not a problem.

BTW, your regular expression is inefficient and/or “odd” in other ways. Would it surprise you to know that it will match the zero-length positions between every character in ANNUAL_SALARY? We offer some learning advice about regular expressions here: https://notepad-plus-plus.org/community/topic/15765/faq-desk-where-to-find-regex-documentation

@Prahlad-Makwana4145

by comparing the dll with the official ones.
Note, it is not reliable to compare SciLexer.dlls from different Npp versions.

@Maury-Markowitz said:

so what is the option?

All I meant was that you only spoke of the View All Characters option. I wasn’t sure if you noticed the other choice that doesn’t get you the “heavy” line-endings, specificially View Whitespace and TAB.

if you need to look for a space followed by a line-ending, I’d suggest a search rather than visual inspection:

Bring up the Find window (ctrl+f).
Find what box: \x20\R
Search mode: Regular expression
Press the Find All in Current Document button.

Thank you for the information!

@ManPython

not 100% sure what you are talking about.
Delivering the udl you linked to together with npp, like it does with markdown language?
Or creating a builtin lexer like the ones visible in the language menu (A-Z items).

If you are talking about the first, then I would assume no as long as not everything is functional (the function list isn’t correct)
and if you talk about the second then I would be surprised because this is normally scintilla territory.

Btw. do you know scintillua?
It seems it has a go lexer added.
I have to admit, that I don’t know how it works as I’ve never used it but maybe you wanna give it a try.

@Ekopalypse said:

virustotal.

Thanks for the info, checked virustotal, everything is in order.

Another victim of PEP 8.

Frenzy Frenzy, I agree with Peter Jones that inconsistency is the issue here. That said, I presume that you were being consistent and that npp silently changed your tabs to spaces, per its default behavior (yea for npp for following the rules; boo for the PEP 8 authors for making that rule).

It shouldn’t have been an issue if you were starting a module from scratch, but would definitely lead to problems if you were editing existing code that already contained real tabs. Once the code is hosed, you have a few options in npp for cleaning it up:

View the white space characters, per Alan Kilborn’s post, and manually fix them

Use the TAB to space option Peter cites - or, ideally, it’s inverse operations, Space to TAB (All) and Space to TAB (Leading)

Use Search > Replace with the Search Mode > Extended option to manually find or replace tab characters using their special \t representation

The automatic space-to-tab converters are good, but bulk operations inevitably (and understandably) overgeneralize. While time consuming, the third option gives you more control over the process, with some level of automation.

FWIW, I’m +1 with you for using tabs. I’m always amused (or perhaps bemused) that right at the top of PEP 8 is a section called “A Foolish Consistency is the Hobgoblin of Little Minds”, followed immediately by the first, and most foolish, of its recommendations - to use spaces instead of tabs (which many in the Python community follow consistently, admittedly with good intentions).

I’ll refrain from commenting on the merits of tabs; there’s plenty on the web about that already. Suffice it to say, there’s a large community of Python programmers that agree with your approach.

@Michael-Mannion said:

Maybe I need to look into making an npp macro;

You can certainly macro-ize that replace op easily enough. See the Macro menu. Your macro would consist of one thing: A Replace All button press.

Hi, super helpful. Thanks so much :)

A million thanks. I successfully downloaded plugin and installed it following the instructions. I also noticed that there was an old “dangling” XMLtools dll on the plugin root directory - which I deleted - but that alone did not solve the gui plugin installation problem where npp never restarted and XMLtools never installed. See screenshots
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/2srv89fdjeb53kt/AAC9tCPbjRMccnORZ1E5C9UOa?dl=0

I add that I have installed the plugin on another client - which worked as expected - running on same platform and similar win7 upgrade.

Given that I use NppExec and not NppExportPlugin, and that there have historically been a lot more questions in the forums that involve NppExec (often in the answer) compared to NppExportPlugin, my fingers have been trained to that sequence, apparently.

@ajay-gohil

How does THAT mess of a solution match the original problem??

@Goran-Vukadinovic
@Alan-Kilborn

just for simplicity - here the reject.

@Fade-To-Gray said:

can you tell me why I don’t receive any notifications of replies?

If you mean like email notification, well, this site just doesn’t work that way. You have to check back to see replies. If you want to just do a quick check, the little bell icon in the upper right will have a white-on-red number in it if any threads you create have replies, or you are “@ mentioned” in any other threads…or if any of your postings are “upvoted”.

I can share it, but it is NOT being called in the scenario I have described. I have a breakpoint in the Visual Studio debugger when any call to WriteProfileString is made and it is not being hit. I am NOT activating the configuration tool, which is the only thing that even CONTAINS calls to WritePrivateProfile string. What my program IS doing, is monitoring the directory for changes and calling GetPrivateProfileString (many times) after the file was changed with NPP.

The issue seems to occur if I make ANOTHER change with NPP and try to save within a few minutes of my program re-reading the INI file. That is RE-READING.

If I look at the directory when NPP reports that the file NPP just tried to modify was locked, the file size shows as ZERO and trying to use ‘type’ to view the content at a CMD prompt shows the file is empty. The content will be “magically” restored if I tell NPP to give up writing to the file, and NOT to save with a new name and then tell NPP NOT to reload the file after NPP (erroneously, IMHO) reports that the content changed.

If the file content changed, NPP did it. I’m afraid I am not likely to believe that Windows File Explorer is changing the file content, and I can prove my program isn’t writing to it, both by using procmon to see that the only write operations come from NPP, and by using the debugger to catch any attempt to call the write functions.

@Alan-Kilborn said:

editor I used for a long time previously used similar verbage for the feature.

I just pulled up the IDE for the proprietary programming environment I use, circa 2005, and it uses “wrap” for the search as well. Maybe it’s an English (or American English) idiom which has worked its way into the official Computer-ese jargon.

@Ekopalypse :

Thinking about wraps, the things to eat, I thought what should be wrapped?

The food gets its name from the verb “to wrap”, which in the Peter Standard Dictionary might be defined as “to surround (often snugly) with something”. In the food, you are “wrapping” the tortilla around the innards of the sandwich; for the search, you are “wrapping” the search position snugly around the whole document.

The wiktionary entry’s item#7 in the verb definition is probably more where the search-wrap came from: “To (cause to) reset to an original value after passing a maximum.”.