@ElectroLund said in Notepad++ open in new instance because I use multiple desktops:

An easy solution to me would be a command line switch that forces the opening of a file into a new NP++ instance. Then I could chose which files to start a new one.

you mean like the already-existing -multiInst option, which does exactly that?

(Though if you do use -multiInst, I recommend also using -nosession, otherwise it will open your whole existing session plus the new file(s) in the new instance)

so if you use notepad++ -nosession -multiInst a.txt b.txt c.txt , it will open those three files to a single new instance, separate from any notepad++ instance already running.

I believe this accomplishes your goal (though maybe not the original poster’s goal)

@rinzwind5 said in Notepad++ whitespace autocomplete define:

It is a needless limitation.

That depends on whether you mean “needless”, as in “I want it to not be that”, or you define needless as, “there is no technical reason why it could not be implemented as such”. Until you have made the code changes to N++ that you think would make that work, and proven that those code changes to make you happy would also not cause regressions for everyone else, you cannot be certain about whether it’s a “needless” restriction or a restriction that has consequences that are annoying to you but is needful for a deep and/or complicated technical reason. Much of the time, such design decisions on less-critical aspects are chosen by “what is practical and feasible” rather than “what would be preferred, if everything was as easy as we wish it was”.

I don’t disagree that it would be great if the function-parameter auto-completion worked in BASIC-style languages. But “what would be nice” isn’t always a strong enough reason to incur the technical-debt and time-debt to implement something that might not be as simple as it looks like on the outside. And if no one makes an official feature request (which you haven’t done yet, despite my suggestion to do that yesterday), then the developer is never going to see or consider your ideas, let alone decide whether or not it’s implemented. So no matter how cogent (or not) your arguments are, they won’t do any good here to convince the developer to agree with you, since he hasn’t seen your request yet.

Also would be nice if custom language additions could be supplied to end user as one zip file and ‘imported’ into notepad++ instead of manually moving/editing files.

Not as a zip, but Language > User Defined Language > Define Your Language > IMPORT does import the XML into the right location for you.
update: Sorry, I was thinking of just the UDL, ignoring the “autocomplete” context of this dicussion. You are right, there is no import action for autoCompletion definitions. However, for the UDL that have autoCompletion definitions in the UDL Collection, my new CollectionInterface plugin (available in the Plugins Admin starting with N++ v8.8.1) allows you to grab a UDL and its associated autoCompletion and/or FunctionList definitions, and install them in the right place for you, and even offer to restart Notepad++ so they’ll take effect.

The original Notepad++ was highly customizable… but since the developer thought that the coders who were most likely to be using N++ in the early days were able to figure out things like where to put config files, such things weren’t originally given “pretty” interfaces. And either no one has asked, or the developer has never felt it worth his time, for him to go back and “pretty” such interfaces up, Since I was part of the push to get the UDL Collection, along with its backend checks and automation, I thought it would be good to create a plugin that gave an easier method to grab a UDL and its associated files, because modern users seem less happy with dealing with config files than early-2000s users were.

Manual is also confusing, because it does not tell you about the difference of build-in languages and the supposed advantages of UDL’s. Which the build-in do not use… so advantages? hmmm

Those two sentences make no sense to me. What difference do you think the manual is not telling you about? What do you think these “supposed advantages of UDL’s” are that are being kept secret from you?

(update: did you somehow read my post as saying “built in languages can do function-parameter autoCompletion with spaces, but UDLs cannot”? or vice versa? because I didn’t intend to say either: I was trying to say that none of the autoCompletion is done with that library, because that library doesn’t have any logic for deciding on autoCompletion [it just provides the interface to be able to pop up any messages that the application wants to pop up], so neither built-in languages nor UDLs get that feature.)

Is this still true? If so it is very cumbersome and something a computer should do. Anyway, it seems to work too without sorting?

It is best practice. If it works for you, and you don’t mind ignoring best practice, go ahead. But the UM recommends it for good reason – a few years ago, when I was spearheading the effort to get an up-to-date User Manual, one of the things we came across was that there were some complicated edge cases (no, I don’t remember the details; there might be discussion here about it, but I am not going to search for them right now) – I believe that the original wiki were were using as our starting point for the User Manual recommended it, and since our tests confirmed edge cases, we maintained that recommendation in the modern User Manual.

Whether or not it’s technically feasible for Notpead++ to do the sorting internally wasn’t something we were concerned about when documenting what is. If no one ever requested that feature, it’s not surprising that it has not been changed in the intervening years. If someone wanted to ask for the feature to be able to not manually sort the KeyWord tag list in the autoCompletion files, they would be within their rights to go create a Feature Request Issue at the GitHub repository, as described in the FAQ I already linked you to, and politely make that request (assuming they have searched to make sure it wasn’t already requested); but, if no one has asked for it, then it’s not surprising the developer has never added it. (Don’t get me wrong: I think it would be a better user experience if the users defining autoCompletion lists didn’t have to figure out how to sort those themselves, and it does seem like sorting is something that the Notepad++ app could do after reading the file; but again, I haven’t studied that section of the code, and cannot say whether there would be unforseen consequences.)

@PeterJones said in Coloring log files:

It looks to me like you want Notepad++ to display your logfile which uses ANSI ESCAPE SEQUENCES in the colors that those ANSI escape sequences define.

v8.1.1 includes the ErrorList higlighting for .log and .err, which allows ANSI escape sequences higlighting, including recognizing and using the ANSI foreground color escape sequences for choosing the foreground color.

@PeterJones

An it was right above auto-detect encoding … lol

Thx again

@xomx @PeterJones
Thank you for your assistance. I am currently using 2 monitors, both are the same model, I believe capable of 2560x1440. My second monitor is set in portrait mode. On the 2nd monitor most of the after image/moving seems to remain on screen when the after image moves higher than the first screen. (I am assuming about 1440 pixels from the bottom of the screen)

Prior to updating to 24h2, I had an update of 23h2 about a week ago, and did not notice any unusual behavior with the undocked search results. I honestly don’t remember if before the 24h2 update, if when I attempted to drag the undocked search results if the window moved or if I just had an outline that would show me when the window would be.

For clarification, the Search Result window is not missing. And prior to messaging here, I had deleted my config files. As well as removing and installing the latest version of Notepad++.

Please let me know if any more information would be of assistance.

So it really was a Scintilla v5.5.6 bug, fix for its next version:
https://sourceforge.net/p/scintilla/code/ci/0364bca4f6d3cb1e1aaffa3baae6a0dfe4b026f2/

@Alan-Kilborn
thankyou for the advice

30000 vs. 32767

I’ve no idea where 30000 originates. A quick search of the Notepad++ source code won’t find it literally. So… apologies to @mkupper about the “sloppily” thing; I did think you were speaking in “ballpark” terms.

@Denine ,

The owner is working on it, but, per here, it’s not as simple as one might hope.

@zitot-hawaii-edu said:

in distraction free mode, the two views/panes became only one view/pane…but I need both

Hmm, presumably, the designer of distraction free mode decided that a second pane would be distracting… :-)

@kracovwolf ,

[?i-s].*?music.*

The [?i-s] is a character class matching the question mark or lowercase i through s. I think you meant (?i-s) to change mode to match case-insensitive with . not matching newline.

@PeterJones

4 years later, and option 1 just saved me some grief.

I had 2 sessions open and autoindent started misbehaving, so I closed the window in which I had about 40 files open, and realized it, just too late. Re-opening one of the files, of course, opened it in the other session, where I had 1 file open. Luckily, the session.xml file had the large session, so all is good.

It’s not that my files were unsaved, it’s just that the session was set up in a convenient way for the work that I was doing.

Cheers for a helpful solution!

Thanks @PeterJones, I really appreciate your time! I spent a chunk of time yesterday too trying to work out the regex if-then-else functionality before I gave up.

I wouldn’t want to pick up everything that starts with \ because that will pull in a lot of commands that aren’t related to document structure (every command starts with \). For example, here’s my minimum working example with a numbered list in it, and that picks up the \begin{enumerate} and \items:

\documentclass{scrreprt} \begin{document} \chapter{Chapter 1 with sections} \section{1.1} \subsection{1.1.1} Lorem \subsection{1.1.2} ipsum \section{1.2} \begin{enumerate} \item dolor \item sit \item amet \end{enumerate} \chapter{Chapter 2 with no sections} consectetur adipiscing elit. \chapter{Chapter 3 with unnumbered sections} \section*{Heading with no number} Phasellus mollis posuere ante vel tincidunt. \section*{Second heading with no number} Donec faucibus tellus sapien, vitae fringilla nulla bibendum eget. \appendix \chapter{Appendix A} \include{document} \chapter{Appendix B with sections} \section{B.1} Nam mauris nisl, cursus at erat in, \section{B.2} molestie luctus nulla. \end{document}

… but picking up the \chapter{} as a function along with the \section{}s is a great workaround!

Here’s what I have now:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> <!-- ==========================================================================\ | To learn how to make your own language parser, please check the following | link: https://npp-user-manual.org/docs/function-list/ \=========================================================================== --> <NotepadPlus> <functionList> <parser displayName="LaTeX Syntax" id ="latex_class" commentExpr="(?x) (%.*?$) # Comment " > <function mainExpr="(?x) # free-spacing (see `RegEx - Pattern Modifiers`) (?im-s) # ignore case, ^ and $ match start/end of line, dot doesn't match newline \\begin{document} # match start of document " > </function> <classRange mainExpr ="(?x) # free-spacing (see `RegEx - Pattern Modifiers`) (?m) # ^ and $ match at line-breaks (?'CLASS_START' ^\s* # optional leading white space before \chapter \\(chapter\*?) ) (?s:.*?) # whatever, (?= # ...up till \s* # ...optional leading white-space of (?: (?&amp;CLASS_START) # ...next header | (\\end{document}) # ...or end of document ) ) " > <className> <nameExpr expr="(?x) # free-spacing (see `RegEx - Pattern Modifiers`) (?<={) # brace before name .*? # name (?=}) # brace after name " /> </className> <function mainExpr="(?xm-s) # free-spacing (see `RegEx - Pattern Modifiers`) \\(chapter| # match chapter so that even \chapters with no \section appear section| # match \section subsection| # match \subsection )\*?{.*} # match starred and unstarred commands " > <functionName> <funcNameExpr expr=".*"/> </functionName> </function> </classRange> </parser> </functionList> </NotepadPlus>

And the result on the sample file:
Screenshot 2025-05-14 094212.png

I modified the classRange mainExpr because I wanted to also match indented \chapter{}s (like I have for the appendices in the new sample file). After that change I found that the last \chapter{} wasn’t being matched with \Z so I changed the alternate search to look for \end{document} instead (which will always appear) and that worked.

Thanks for your help!

@Malek-A ,

If your active font has a glyph for that character, then whether it looks like an emoji or not depends on that font. If your chosen font does not contain the glyph, depending on your Notepad++ DirectWrite preferences, Windows OS may go through some alternate fonts to find one that has the glyph.

For example, for Yin Yang, if I use my default Fira Code font, which does not apparently have the glyph for that symbol, it uses an emoji-style rendering, because whatever backup font Windows OS has chosen uses the emoji rendering:
7ac95ec0-141b-4916-8dbd-7d0fab933f02-image.png

If I switch to DejaVu Sans Mono, which does have a glyph for that font, it looks like a normal character:
73f467c9-8ca2-4f1d-b6e3-1c26be584638-image.png

(both those screenshots were zoomed, so that you could actually make out the character rendering)

It’s not actually a Notepad++ specific issue: I can see similar even in my browser: ☯/☯ renders as

3414e66a-bbd0-446e-be30-b97906eca8ea-image.png

for me – once again, because of the font choices in the browser settings, and whether or not those fonts have a glyph for the given character.

Windows uses what it calls the CompositeFont for doing glyph substitutions. If you change your Notepad++ Settings > Preferences > MISC > …DirectWrite… / Rendering Mode , you can influence whether or not the substitutions happen (turning it off in older versions, or to GDI (most compatible) in newer versions should stop the substitution, but might mean that all unrecognized characters show up as �.

You can read more about CompositeFont in some of my old posts, or searching the web in your favorite engine.

“Some characters are not displayed [Unicode]” [May 2018] “Default font for Devanagiri script” [Apr 2019] “门这个字显示有问题” [Oct 2024] search here for other mentions of CompositeFont [insert link to favorite search engine’s results here]

The web search is mostly likely to be helpful in figuring out how to edit your Windows OS settings to make use of a different backup/alternate font for a given range of characters, if you end up going down that route.

But the best advice is to pick a font that has a glyph that you like for every unicode character you care about. (Easier said than done, I know)

@Palittle-Studios,

Not A Bad Idea But With Like Step-By-Step Tutorials, It Will Be GOOD.
You Could Mention Libraries Too

The FAQ is sufficient for anyone who already knows how to compile their code; once they know that, they can just put those compilation commands into the examples given. That’s as “step-by-step” as anyone who knows how to code needs. Libraries are done inside Notepad++ the same way they are when typing C/C++ code in any text editor; and passing libraries to the linker is done in Notepad++ the same way it is with any command-line compiling. All Notepad++ (and the Run menu or NppExec plugin or whatever you choose from the FAQ) are doing is helping you to “memorize” those command line calls, so that you don’t have to type them completely every time you compile.

If you need help learning C/C++, or learning how to compile and link C/C++ from the command line, there are about a gazillion webpages that already exist that explain how to do that – a forum focused on Notepad++ text editor is not the best place to look for details on the elementary learning of coding. Once you learn and understand coding in general, and compling-and-linking from the command line, then doing that from within Notepad++, using the information in the FAQ, is a piece of cake.

@PeterJones Thanks for that information, I’ll definitely turn on that setting. As far as searching goes, I hadn’t thought of using the term “backup.”

@PeterJones Ok, Reduce was checked. So I’m stuck with this.

It would be nice to control the font size and font name for the tab bar text.

Thanks!

Consider this closed.