@gerdb42 Thanks. A little tricky, but will be useful once I’ve worked on a couple of simple ‘test’ examples. It’s not exactly like the Npp version, apparently, but will serve as ‘fairy bike wheels’ until I master this stuff a little more. :-)

That’s a common workflow challenge — Compare Plus does a great job highlighting changes, but extracting them takes a few extra steps. One trick is to use the Search → Find Discussed Lines → Marked Lines or export the diff via plugin features (if available). Also, you can manually copy from the right pane while filtered by the markers. For more tips and user tricks, check out this existing thread: https://community.notepad-plus-plus.org/topic/25461/comparing-and-editing-files

Thanks, @Terry-R and @PeterJones - there’s a lot in that plugin that I’m not sure I’ll need or understand, but the Elastic Tabs does what I need for now.

Thank you, your help was very useful and effective.

@AlainCh2 said in Replace Notepad++ as Default W10 editor. How to ?:

Activated in right click > Open With
Open with >Choose another App \ Browse to Program Files/Notepad++ 🙄

-That’s not enough … …crazy as it can be,

That always worked for me back when I was using Win10. And I just verified I had no difficulty in Win11 getting it to keep Notepad++ as an Open With for .ini files.

BUT now you have fixed it as > Edit with Notepad++,

If all you are looking for is the Edit with Notepad++ choice in the right-click menu, when you run the installer initially, assuming it prompted with the UAC prompt, your installation should have included the ShellExtension DLL C:\Program Files\Notepad++\contextMenu\NppShell.dll (assuming you installed newer than v8.5.1; older versions used a different name, and didn’t work with Win11). And it should have registered that DLL so that the Windows Explorer context menu includes that. If something went wrong with that registration, you could open a cmd.exe or PowerShell window in that contextMenu directory, probably using “as Admin” when open that window, and then follow the manual DLL registration instructions instructions from the user manual. (That page in the user manual has a lot of different tactics to get the Edit with Notepad++ or similar, including a registry entry that adds it as a verb to all files, so that you don’t have to do the OpenWith on each file type. But the Shell Extension DLL is really the preferred method, because it’s designed to do things the way Windows likes.)

With the modern Notepad++, that same DLL should work to get the right-click entry with either Win10 or Win11.

If you got it working using an alternate method (like the registry edit shown in the first post), great. This is just presenting an alternate method, and the way that Notepad++ intends you to get Edit with Notepad++ functionality.

@Lee ,

Since it last worked in v8.8.2, the problem wasn’t actually with the v8.8.6 specifically, so it doesn’t belong in the v8.8.6 announcement, which is only for regressions between v8.8.5 to v8.8.6 specifically. Problems that aren’t specific to the newest version should be talked about in the Help Wanted section (where I moved your post), not in the announcements. If it can be confirmed as a bug in Notepad++, we will then encourage you to create an bug report in Notepad++'s GitHub-based Issues tracker.

There is a command-line argument, -loadingTime, which could help debug a slowness.
Are you able to edit the shortcut that you use, so that you can see what it says takes a while?

Actually, do you have anti-virus or similar computer-protection software? Because v8.8.3, which is the first version that you have a problem with, was the first version to use a self-signed certificate, rather than a DigiCert certificate. I am thinking that it’s likely that your AV software is getting hung up on that – so it scans notepad++.exe once per boot. Follow the instructions in the 8.8.3 description (or equivalently, in the User Manual’s Self-Signed Certificate section, choosing Local Machine) to make sure you’ve got the certificate installed correctly. If that’s not enough, there’s an example in this discussion, the user eventually found that going to the “HIPS” setting in Comodo Internet Security (the AV/safety SW on that machine) and setting it to allow Notepad++ was enough to get rid of the problem: so you should check your AV/safety SW for HIPS or similar settings to allow/trust/whitelist certain apps.

@Ragnar-Lodbrok ,

My suggestion: Use the Search > Replace menu action (or Ctrl+H as the default shortcut):

FIND WHAT = ^(\w+:\w+)?.*$(\R)? REPLACE WITH = ?1$1$2 SEARCH MODE = Regular Expression

then use REPLACE ALL button

The FIND WHAT puts any xyz123:abc987 at the beginning of a line into memory group #1, skips over the rest of the line, and puts the newline sequence in group#2.
The REPLACE with will replace that entire line with just the contents of group#1 followed by group#2 (so the xyz123:abc987 and newline) IF the xyz123:abc987 exists; if it DOESN’T exist, it will replace the entire line with nothing (hence deleting the line)

I believe this does what you want.

----

Useful References Please Read Before Posting Template for Search/Replace Questions Formatting Forum Posts Notepad++ Online User Manual: Searching/Regex FAQ: Where to find other regular expressions (regex) documentation

@TG-King:

In addition to @PeterJones’ suggestions, also be sure you haven’t accidentally zoomed out (for example, by using the mouse wheel with the Ctrl key down): View | Zoom | Restore Default Zoom will set zoom back to normal.

I’ve added this case to the Manual!
https://d0vgan.github.io/nppexec/?q=4.6.20

A little “almost” missed update: WebEdit has been added to the nppPluginList and is available in Notepad++ v8.8.6. 🥳

Regardless, I still would like to add a few more small features to the plugin. I’m trying to make these available in the latest releases,* and if everything works fine, I’d like to eventually submit them to the nppPluginList with a new (and a last?) PR.

* To try it out, just overwrite the C:\Program Files\Notepad++\plugins\WebEdit\WebEdit.dll file with the downloaded and unzipped one – but make a backup anyway. ;)

@Mark-Olson I updated all the plugins because, as you suggested, they were too outdated
thanks a lot

Thanks for the replies both.

@Coises that seems to have solved it! - all is good again after switching to Direct Write - many thanks!

I haven’t updated video drivers, but Win10 installed a couple of updates at some point today (KB5065429 and KB5065957) - maybe there was a related change there somewhere.

@PeterJones said in easy way to move a file tab in the open file list:

I am assuming you are talking about the sub-window/panel toggled using View > Document List

Ah, now the original question makes sense. I wasn’t familiar with that feature until now, so without the “>”, I figured that “View Document List” from the post and “open file list” from the title were both referring to the list of files that you see in the File menu, and that they hadn’t noticed that this list is different from the active set of tabs.

FWIW, I’m a bit surprised that you can’t reorder files from within the View > Document List feature via click-and-drag. I can understand why some people would prefer this vertical layout over the horizontal layout of the tabs; it’s certainly more intuitive than the layout that you get when you check the Vertical option in the Tab Bar section of Settings > Preferences, so perhaps there needs to be a “stacked” sub-option for this layout.

@Justin-Brown said in Please recommend encryption plug-in:

@PeterJones I know this is an old thread, but it is precisely what I was looking for. But I am curious if you are concerned about the ability to “undelete” the temp file when you use your script. Does rm fully remove the file, including overwriting bits? Or has Windows improved it’s undelete such that it is no longer a concern?

I hadn’t noticed I used rm. That’s an old win32 port of the gnu linux rm command (from the gnuwin32 bundle; hasn’t been updated in years). I have never looked into the source code, so I don’t know for sure if it overwrites first, but it’s doubtful.

I also no nothing about the advanced features of windows del or the powershell equivalent. However, I don’t know whether microsoft has made those secure deletes, either. (A Notepad++ forum isn’t the best place to research about windows features, especially the more esoteric aspects.)

If research in appropriate places doesn’t give you the answers you want or hope for with regard to windows file deletion, you might look into installing a secure command-line-based file deleter; it would very much surprise me if such a utility didn’t exist, but I have never gone looking for it, so I have no specific recommendations. But if you find such a utility that you trust, then use it (with its appropriate command-line options) in place of the rm -rf that I used in the script

@rdipardo

This is the perfect option!

@Wester said in Alt key interferes with work:

Same problem here – I’m studying the software and taking notes in Notepad in both Russian and English, and every time this stupid layout pops up and blocks input.

As @Michael-Vincent said 3 years ago, hitting Alt is used as an accelerator to keyboard-access menu bars in almost every win32-api-based Windows application. Include Microsoft’s own notepad.exe.

Who even came up with this?

A small company called Microsoft has been using that feature in their operating system for decades. I am sorry this bothers you.

The devs of a program whose only purpose is text input didn’t consider that pressing Alt would ruin typing when switching languages? Or did no one think that there are not only Americans but also people who actually use multiple keyboard layouts? And what are all these weirdos even writing here?

And then you switch to full on insult mode, being rude to people who had nothing to do with that design decision that happened decades ago. Brilliant, and well argued. (That last sentence was sarcasm, in case you couldn’t tell.)

@PeterJones
Again, thanks a lot and good luck/success for your further work.
Ps. Do you know perhaps an old program “VEDIT”? I worked with it for some decennies ;-) , but …