What language were you writing, and did you save it with a file name with the appropriate suffix - e.g. MyProg.java if you were writing Java code.

Perhaps you didn’t give it a suffix until after you saved it away, and next time you edit the file it will respond to the suffix.

You really need to give some more details.

More than likely this is possible but you’d have to take the time to write a plugin to do it.

Settings–>Preferences–>MISC.
Near bottom right corner you will find the “Highlight Matching Tags” checkboxes…

using XP is far bigger of a concern, what do you think limited use on XP is actually achieving?

The spell checking is often very useful when editing code, and underlining URL’s seems pretty harmless. Those URL’s open if you double click them - which can be extremely useful even within code - and the underlining alerts you to the fact that this is possible. I find it handy to put URL’s inside C comments, and sometimes code opens a URL, and it is convenient to check the URL by double clicking. Why would you ever not want the option to open a URL that is embedded in your text? Without the spell checker, I would never find odd spelling errors buried in rarely used error messages!

Defaulting features to OFF has the disadvantage that busy people probably never discover they exist!

Maybe it would help if users could vote for or against proposed changes - my bet is that a LOT of people are very happy with the vast majority of NP++features!

@AndrewSmith

The project file is just XML. Why not write a Python script to create the XML file you want? I wrote myself an AWK script to do that, and it worked well.

I don’t use the project panel much any more–only for “stock” help files and such that I always want to be able to get to. For “project” file searching, I use the Open File In Solution plug-in from http://npp.incrediblejunior.com.

thanks you so much was so close had \t\d\d\d but it kept showing no match as I was still searching in Extended, not regular.

Well, Notepad++ is a text editor with syntax coloring and some auto-complete for many languages. Each language has its own structure of files, but this is not handled by the editor. If Django is a kind of Python, there is some coloring and auto-complete built in Np++.

Looking at Google (https://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=notepad%2B%2B+Django) I see some topic that may help you, eg:
http://mherman.org/blog/2012/12/30/django-basics/
https://openhatch.org/wiki/Django_for_Designers/Laptop_setup/Windows_text_editor
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/django-users/jBeTpm1kzi0
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8483969/unexpected-indent-error-when-using-notepad-for-creating-django-function

When working on an opened file in the notepad++ interface, you would select a file name mentioned in the opened file, right click and have a menu Open with the name of the selected file.

This is inside Run menu named as “Open file”.
Ofc you can add it to context menu: http://docs.notepad-plus-plus.org/index.php/Context_Menu

Doesn’t the menu Encoding -> character set -> … works for you?