@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.

@Mark-Boonie

It looks to me like Notepad++ can’t load the font you’ve chosen, and it has fallen back to a default system font. I might be missing something, but the font of your text looks to me to be the same as the font that shows the filename in the tab and the title bar.

Can you verify that if you select a really common, system-supplied monospaced font, like Courier New, you get what you would expect?

What is the font you’re trying to use? If appropriate, could you tell us where you got it?

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.

@Abhay-Miller said:

just another overhyped promise

Note in case it isn’t clear, that there were never any promises made, by anyone, for a “next gen” macro system.

@Victorel-Petrovich seems to be on a one-man crusade to make people think so, however. Not to fault him, of course, because, it’s clear that he wants such a macro system, and to quote an overused phrase, “it’s good to want things”.

IMO, there’s no need for a better macro system, because scripting plugins have existed for a long time, and are very robust, and eliminate the need for macros of any kind.

@Valtécio said in TAB like typewriter time:

I will continue trying to find a setting to make this plugin work properly

At the risk of this sounding like bad-mouthing and self-promotion:

In my opinion, the current ElasticTabstops plugin is worthless. Three years ago, its creator wanted to take over the name of the existing ElasticTabstops plugin for his new version. The author of the older version conceded that he didn’t have time to maintain it and gave his blessing to the change. The new author then put up one version and promptly abandoned it. Issues are ignored and there is no evidence of any intention to correct its problems.

In April of 2023 I released a plugin named Columns++. Among other functions, it includes an implementation of Elastic tabstops.

If you want to try an Elastic Tabstops implementation as a possible improvement to your workflow, I recommend the one in Columns++. You can install it from Plugins Admin. I strongly recommend uninstalling the other one first.

@guy038 said:

After some tests

…of the version from the PR…

"…in extended mode, I should add the \r\n at the end of each line for a correct search”

Well… I think the answer to that is… don’t do it.

It’s a matter of knowing what your data is. And, admittedly, this is difficult as real \r and \n are invisible in the Find what box. But this is true also if you select some multiline text and press Ctrl+f, it’s not peculiar to the proposed new code.

@PeterJones
The advantage of a specific category is that one can subscribe / watch that particular one. Or binge in reading many “solutions” in a row.
“General” is general, almost anything goes there.
“Blog” is for blogs… which IMO is something like long prose, chronological… doesn’t seem suitable (to me) for sharing a few random tips/ solutions one finds.

Perhaps you’re right that tags are underutilized. Though in this case, I’m not sure that a single tag would fit the many kinds of tips/solutions one would like to share. Because there is no enforcing of a particular tag.

@chk1 said in Marked text manipulation:

Right now, with help of the script, I open the Marks search (Ctrl+M), enter my search term and press “Mark all”. Then I run the script to convert all marks to multi-edit selections. I want to reduce these extra steps if possible, i.e. in the best case: Ctrl+F, enter search word, hit Alt+Enter.

It might not be worth it for your case, but the Search dialog in the Columns++ plugin has Select All as an option on the dropdown menu on the Count button.

You can assign a shortcut to Columns++ | Search in Notepad++ shortcut mapper; but at present, there is no straightforward way to open the Count button menu using only the keyboard.

@PeterJones, that works for me. Thanks!