The problem seems to persist, so please ignore my previous post.

Point (E), which was @cmeriaux’s suggestion originally, is a good one!

Point (F)…is an excellent suggestion. I’m coming to Notepad++ after using Multiedit for almost 20 years. One of the hardest things to get used to in that transition was the Find dialog staying open after you tell it to Find something. It should close until I want it again (shifting input focus to the current editor tab), at which point I can bring it up with a single shortcut. I know I can close it with Esc, but I’ve never gotten used to doing that.

Another Find dialog situation that frustrates me that point (F) would solve: I’ve specified my text and it has done the first find for me, and I’ve put the focus back the in an document tab. If I use shortcut keys to find successive matches, all is good until no more matches are found. At this point (here comes the frustrating part), focus is returned to the Find dialog! This only happens with the Find dialog still open; Notepad++ won’t re-open a closed Find dialog…but I just want the window border to flash at the end of matches, regardless of whether the Find dialog is open or not

For the benefit of other readers that this behavior might annoy (perhaps less than it annoys Pavel P), a possible improvement idea may be found here:

https://notepad-plus-plus.org/community/topic/12077/opening-read-only-files

You have to download de “Compare” plugin using the Plugin Manager (menu Plugins -> Plugin Manager).

After installing it you can use the Alt+D shortcut to compare or use the new created menu Plugins -> Compare -> Compare

This works in all 32bits versions since most plugins still have no support for 64bit versions.

Thank you so much guy038.

I use regex for find/replace frequently, but didn’t consider using it for this. I’m sometimes working with more than 1 million lines of file lists, and macros usually worked well, but regex could produce quicker output results.

Another time I’d use macros, which I don’t think this regex method will work on, is copying the file’s name into the text.

For example, if the text is:

2016900000011.txt.201610190800

…and the file containing the text is test.txt. Using Edit -> ‘Copy to Clipboard -> Current Filename to Clipboard’ in the macro, the output would be:

test.txt\2016900000011.txt.201610190800

I guess I can perhaps try accomplishing this when creating the directory lists from a command line.

Thanks again for your detailed feedback!