Moderator Note: this topic was renamed to its English equivalent (to make searching by topic name easier), and moved from the “Notepad++ & Plugin Development” to “Help Wanted” (because it wasn’t a question about how to contribute to Notepad++ or how to make a plugin)

I was considering to add a FAQ to the NppExec Manual in 2017, in the times of NppExec v0.6 alpha 1.
Well, finally, it happened :)

https://d0vgan.github.io/nppexec/NppExec_Manual/FAQ.html

@sadicus said in How to show the special characters?:

How to show the special characters?
I’m not even sure if that’s whats neede, but not understanding what else is causing spaces between words.
in this case editing a “New Doc Sizes.psp” file.
When Photoshop reads the psp file, it displays correctly with no space.
In Text Edit, it displays with several spaces between the words.

If the goal is to sort the list of settings then sort and save the file (make a backup first). If Photoshop is happy with your sorted file then you are done. The exact nature of the spaces would remain a mystery.

If you want to know what those spaces are then I think it would help if you were to copy paste the lines for CardRack and MayaShelf into the forum thread as your reply. Put a line with three back ticks before your example lines another line with three back ticks afterwards like this:
``` txt
“Card   Rack”, …
“Maya   Shelf”, …
```

The problem is that while we can walk you through various ways to show special characters in Notepad++ the results will vary depending on what invisible characters you are dealing with. If you do the three back ticks thing as shown above then hopefully we all will be able to figure out what the invisible characters are and can provide better directions on what settings or features to use if you want those things that look like spaces to be clearer to you when looking at the file in Notepad++.

@YukiYasha said in Notepad++ on Macs:

What prevents us from deploying it on Mac OS?

Nothing prevents you or anyone from writing an application called Notepad++ for the Mac. Notepad++'s source code is available and is licensed so that you can look at and use it.

The developer of Notepad++ for Windows has chosen to focus their entire attention on Windows and has tuned Notepad++ to work well within Windows.

Internally, Macs and Windows are very different.

Someone who wants to use the Notepad++'s source code to create a Mac version will be faced with that 100% of the code and data structures is tuned for Windows. Let’s start with something that seems basic and simple, which is the keyboard. Macs and Windows machines do not have the same set of keys. They also use very different data structures and key codes. Windows was designed to work well with IBM PC style keyboards. 40 years later Windows and applications such as Notepad++ are still very much oriented around how IBM PC style keyboards work.

If you are writing a Notepad++ for the Mac do you spend time figuring out how to map what you get from a Mac’s keyboard into Windows style keyboard events, data structures, and scan codes or do you want your text editor for the Mac to be efficient and to use Mac style logic within your editor? These decisions will happen over and over for every single aspect of Notepad++'s Windows centric code.

Rather than attempting to rework Notepad++'s code to be native for the Macintosh it is much easier to Google for Notepad++ for the Mac. There are over eight million hits. It looks like TextWrangler used to be a popular text editor for the Mac. Apple broke TextWrangler with an update to MacOS. The developers of another text editor for the Mac, BBEdit, added some TextWrangler features.

@Jeff-Schindler said in Always open file in last tab:

A preference for this behavior would be awesome (“Always move opened files to last tab”).

You’d have to make a feature request; see HERE for how to do that.

@Camille-Hinkle said in how to updaet the Meta Name = Desc. as it is blank on my website.:

so the question is as the owner of the domain and website, can i make this change myself and if YES how?

What makes you think that users of the Notepad++ application will (should) answer this question? You should be looking at the provider of your website for solving this.

Terry

@ErolB1 said in Is this normal behavior for this program? How do I disable these features?:

Maybe there needs to be a “Frequently Altered Preferences” (FAP) list, analogous to an FAQ.

There already is…it’s called the online manual. :-) However, just like the manual most people don’t read the FAQ’s either, rather they post here for instant answers. It’s the Google generation. If there was a world wide power outage tomorrow, only the old “dinosaurs” would know how to actually research answers, while the rest would be twiddling their thumbs not knowing how to find information that wasn’t available prior to the web. It’s called, ‘hard copy’. :-)

@PeterJones said in Unable to use updated Notepad++:

Despite that, I upvoted you so you won’t have difficulty replying

I may regret my effort… Your profile makes you appear to be a spammer. If you post anything remotely spamlike, rest assured you will be banned quite promptly. Good luck.

@Joshua-Rowsom You are in a somewhat dark small wooden cabin that has been used to store cloth bags of gunpower for decades. There is gunpower dust all over the place. Sunlight is streaming through a small window and you can see there is also a lot of dust in the air.

You have a box of matches.

What do you do?

Editing DLL files is much like playing with a box of matches in this cabin.

The message you saw probably looked like what is below though I’m puzzled that you would get this for a DLL file unless you were playing the game at the time you were editing the file and the game is making changes to the DLL.

--------------------------- Reload --------------------------- "c:\the\path\to\your\dll\file" This file has been modified by another program. Do you want to reload it and lose the changes made in Notepad++? --------------------------- Yes No ---------------------------

When you make changes to a file using Notepad++ then your changes are not immediately saved to the file you are working on. If someone or something else makes changes to the file at this point then you will see the warning notice about “This file has been modified by another program.” Your choices are:

Clicking “Yes” means that you intend to abandon the changes you had made within Notepad++ to the file. Notepad++ will reload the file so that you are seeing the current version of it. Clicking “No” means that you intend to continue working on the file in Notepad++. If you then save the file then you will be overwriting whatever changes that other program made.

When I get the “This file has been modified by another program” message and I was not expecting it then I usually select “No” but then Save-As the file I’m working on to a new name. I then compare the original file against the copy I just saved. That way I can see the changes someone or something else made vs. the changes I made and based on that decide if and how to update the original file.

Of course, none of that helps you with the NUL in dll file question though @PeterJones answer looks good.

@abracadabruh1 said in Notepad++ writes a lot to disk after closing:

Resource Monitor,

Resource Monitor displays the number of bytes per second. This is unrelated to the number of bytes written. For example, if it takes you one millionth of a second to write one byte then Resource Monitor says you are writing at one million bytes per second.

Other tools such as Microsoft’s Sysinternals procmon can better show you which files an application is writing to and the number of bytes in each write. Unfortunately, procmon is not perfect as ideally what we want is a nice list of the files written to and the total bytes written.

@Michael-Döring said in Two search boxes each View:

My question is whether I can keep a search box each view in parallel. I often have to search for separate things in both views and it would be a great relief if I didn’t have to type everything twice every time.

One option is to take advantage of Notepad++'s bookmarking feature. Use Ctrl-M to pull up the Mark dialog box and enable the Bookmark line checkbox. Do the first search as a “Mark”.

Switch to the Find tab and enter the second pattern you want to search for and do the search.

Close the find/Replace/…/Mark box.

Now you can use the F2 function key to jump to the next bookmarked line (the first pattern you searched for) and the F3 function to jump to instances of the second pattern. Shift+F2 and Shift+F3 both work and will go to the previous pattern 1 or pattern 2 as desired. Ctrl-F2 will toggle bookmarks on a line. I like this as I can do a mark to bookmark lines in a file I. As I then visually inspect the lines and if I no longer need to deal with that item I do Ctrl-F2 to switch the bookmark on that line off. The marked highlighter makes it easy for me to see where on the line my search had matched.

Also, I don’t know if you are aware that the Find what field in search box is a drop down list of the most recent searches. Click the ˅ down arrow at the right side of the Find what field. You don’t need type everything twice but instead can pick out recent things you have searched for from the drop down list.

@guy038
Your regex is better if everything is quoted, but that’s not really what I meant.

In most CSV files, a column is only wrapped in quotes if it contains the separator or a newline.

3223309f-ecd6-4839-adbd-c3ff8c9fe1db-image.png

In the above example (pretty colors courtesy of CSVLint), most columns aren’t wrapped in quotes except column 3 of row 5 and column 2 of row 6. The other part of my regex is the (?:[^"]|\\")* alternation inside the quotes, which is necessary to allow an escaped quote character to be present inside quotes.

Using my column regex (?'column'(?:(?!")(?:(?!\r\n)[^,])*(?<!")|"(?:[^"]|\\")*")) converts

nums,names,cities,date,zone,subzone,contaminated nan,Bluds,BUS,,1,b,FALSE 0.5,dfsd,FUDG,12/13/2020 0:00,2,c,TRUE 1.2,qere,GOLAR,,3,f,TRUE 3.4,flodt,"comma,in \"column\"",,4,q,FALSE 4.6,"newline in column",QUZ,10/17/2014 0:00,5,"",TRUE 7,Unyir,MOKJI,5/11/2017 0:00,6,i,TRUE

to seven lines of a,b,c,d,e,f,g as expected.

@CodeNameLin said in Possible pattern to skip some numbers:

edit in bulk

I suppose you have to say more about what this means, before someone can provide a good answer.

@Coises said in Is there a way in version 8.5.8 to remove the line number column down the left side of the page? I find it to be very visually intrusive and unnecessary.:

Coises
@Bill Miller
about an hour ago

@Bill-Miller said in Is there a way in version 8.5.8 to remove the line number column down the left side of the page? I find it to be very visually intrusive and unnecessary.:

Is there a way in version 8.5.8 to remove the line number column down the left side of the page? I find it to be very visually intrusive and unnecessary.

Settings | Preferences… | Margins/Border/Edge | Line Number

Uncheck Display.

I’m glad Word Wrap worked. We’ll give you an upvote so you have reputation. I think there is work in progress to fix that limitation when it comes to replying — others who stumble on this can avoid it by removing the pre-filled quotation and just writing new reply text.

You’re my hero Coises. Thank you for riding in to my rescue once more.

@Bill-Miller

From the menu:

View => Word wrap

Otherwise, what you are asking is not really possible in a text editor. Try a word processor instead.

Cheers.

@guy038 said :

SEARCH (?s-i)^\h*BEGIN_BOUNDARY((?!ABSENT_WORD).)+?END_BOUNDARY.*?$\R

Maybe this is better without capturing into group1?, i.e. :

SEARCH (?s-i)^\h*BEGIN_BOUNDARY(?:(?!ABSENT_WORD).)+?END_BOUNDARY.*?$\R

Also, OP said nothing about what comes before the word that begins the block nor what comes after the word that ends the block (assumption is the begin-word and the end-word are different) so thus maybe this is an even better expression:

SEARCH (?s-i)BEGIN_BOUNDARY(?:(?!ABSENT_WORD).)+?END_BOUNDARY

It’s a pity the OP never returned to either provide more specifics (and sample data) or to say whether or not the originally proposed solution was successful.

@guy038 :

Interesting. I hadn’t thought of it as any sort of “general” solution to a problem!

[ But, really, there already was the makings of a general solution to half of the problem, from you (ref. HERE) ]

A couple of notes:

Note 1:

IF RR = ?1$0:, the complete BSR…ESR sections, WITHOUT the FR string, are deleted

In this variant of the replace expression, the : isn’t necessary, thus:

IF RR = ?1$0, the complete…

Note 2:

Since the overall regex uses group1, it isn’t available in the BSR, ESR, FR and even the RR subexpressions.

Thus a user of this would have to keep in mind that if he is using further grouping inside these expressions, that he has to think in terms of group2 and above.

This is definitely unlike another templated regex solution I use a lot, ref. HERE, where the user does not have to keep this in mind.

@Dick-Adams-0 said in Regex to Find Consecutive Uppercase Letters:

I didn’t realize the case sensitivity flags had that effect

A number of people have argued that for regex the Match case checkbox shouldn’t apply, and, unless the (?i) flag is used in the regex, that all regexes should be case sensitive.

@PeterJones said in Working with sessions doesn't work very well here... and also erase the session file:

*6-There is a serious problem when I first open a session because NP++ simply deletes the content of one of the sessions, from the “.nps” file.i.e. one of the nps files runs out of content and I have to recreate it from scratch.

Do you have an exact sequence of events that replicates this?

I think (did not check that myself yet) that this is what these patches are intended for:
Do not modify user created session even for inaccessible files
Fix user created session saved on exit issue if multi-Inst is enabled
Fix user created session modified in multiInst mode

These patches will be in the upcoming N++ version (probably v8.5.9).

And there will be the new read-only placeholders feature (for the momentarily inaccessible session files) as well.

@Peter-Smids said in How do I turn on the colors to improve readability.:

That’s right, it’s YAML, but how do I get these colors on?

A limited number of Notepad++ themes define styles for YAML. You can try one of these, although none of them resemble your screen capture (of Sublime Text…?):

DansLeRuSH-Dark DarkModeDefault Deep Black Hello Kitty HotFudgeSundae Khaki MossyLawn Navajo Obsidian Solarized-light Solarized Vim Dark Blue Zenburn

Assuming you prefer a dark theme, you can customize one from the list (e.g., “Deep Black”) using the Style Configurator:

yaml-deep-black-styled.png

Another option is to add the YAML file type to a theme that doesn’t have it yet. First, do some minor customization of the target theme so it gets copied into %AppData%\Notepad++\themes (if N++ is installed for all users; otherwise just look in the themes directory wherever your portable N++ is). Open the theme’s XML file and paste these definitions anywhere under the /NotepadPlus/LexerStyles path:

<LexerType name="yaml" desc="YAML" ext=""> <WordsStyle name="DEFAULT" styleID="0" fgColor="ADDB67" bgColor="262626" colorStyle="1" fontName="" fontStyle="0" fontSize="" /> <WordsStyle name="COMMENT" styleID="1" fgColor="A0A0A0" bgColor="262626" colorStyle="1" fontName="" fontStyle="2" fontSize="" /> <WordsStyle name="IDENTIFIER" styleID="2" fgColor="82AAFF" bgColor="262626" colorStyle="1" fontName="" fontStyle="1" fontSize="" /> <WordsStyle name="INSTRUCTION WORD" styleID="3" fgColor="F08080" bgColor="262626" colorStyle="1" fontName="" fontStyle="1" fontSize="" keywordClass="instre1" /> <WordsStyle name="NUMBER" styleID="4" fgColor="FFC600" bgColor="262626" colorStyle="1" fontName="" fontStyle="0" fontSize="" /> <WordsStyle name="REFERENCE" styleID="5" fgColor="C0FFFF" bgColor="262626" colorStyle="1" fontName="" fontStyle="0" fontSize="" /> <WordsStyle name="DOCUMENT" styleID="6" fgColor="E385FF" bgColor="262626" colorStyle="1" fontName="" fontStyle="0" fontSize="" /> <WordsStyle name="TEXT" styleID="7" fgColor="93CDBA" bgColor="262626" colorStyle="1" fontName="" fontStyle="0" fontSize="" /> <WordsStyle name="ERROR" styleID="8" fgColor="CD6000" bgColor="FFCE76" colorStyle="1" fontName="" fontStyle="1" fontSize="" /> </LexerType>

After saving the file and restarting N++, you can customize the newly YAML-aware theme in the Style Configurator.