@mapsonx said in Notetab++ novice questions:

Notetab++

I think you mean “Notepad++”

I’ll answer your last one, first, because it’s not related to the others:

If I add content to a new file, I am not prompted to save/dismiss, but when i open notepad++, that content is still there?? Is there a filw created. I’ve never experienced that type that of behavior before.

That’s Settings > Preferences > Backup > ☑ Enable session snapshot and periodic backup option being turned on: as described in the backup settings in the User Manual, in that mode, Notepad++ will periodically take a snapshot of any edited files, and even remember those unsaved changes the next time you restart Notepad++. I, personally, am not a fan, because it lulls people into foolish behavior (like never saving/naming a file). However, that has been Notepad++'s default behavior for years… and it’s been there long enough that Microsoft took a page from Notepad++'s book (because in the “app” version of MS notepad that gets shipped with Windows 11 – the version that also now has tabbed editing, not the old win10-and-earlier one-window-per-file – now also keeps your unsaved changes from run to run).

If you don’t want to keep unsaved changes, and you want to be prompted before exiting Notepad++, you can turn off that option: congratulations for wanting to control your data. To better understand this feature, and other backup-related issues, I highly recommend reading the backup settings in the User Manual and this forum’s backup FAQ, just to get a better handle on what’s going on.

Now to your first question:

1 I have both portable versions, from here and portableapps.

Downloading from the official website is great. Downloading the portableapps version is a bad idea, because they edit the binary without saying what they change (in violation of the open-source license, IMO); we cannot guarantee that the portableapps version behaves in any way, shape, or form like the official Notepad++ release. Use portableapps at your own risk (or better, don’t use it, ever).

How do I update the version form this site and maintain tre current settings. I tried to keep the current .xml files bu that did not help.

It helped, but you might not have kept all the right files. The official Online User Manual for Notepad++ has a section devoted to upgrading the portable edition: https://npp-user-manual.org/docs/upgrading/#upgrading-a-portable-edition

Toolbar size and labels. I want the larger toolbar, and if possible, button labels., but aI like the fancier icons I don’t know why the toolbars look different.

For builtin icons, the “large” icons only come in the new “Fluent UI” look, hence the names in the Settings > Preferences > Toolbar section (was a sub-section of the General tab, before v8.8.0) are “Fluent UI: large” and “Filled Fluent UI: large”. If you have one portable set to “standard icons (small)” and another to “Fluent UI: large”, of course your toolbars are going to look different.

Also, this is strange. Upon opening this sites version after I trying to update it, both toolbars were now identical to portableapps, and it had the same content as the portableapps version.

When you updated your portable copies, you presumably overwrote all your config files, including your choice of which toolbar icon set you were using, so they went back to the same. (Though I’m surprised they went back to the “Fluent UI: large”, which your screenshot appears to be showing, because

Are they cloud connected? Yes, I know, doesn’t make sense.

No. (Well, not unless you had set the Cloud settings in the preferences dialog, and set them both to the same cloud folder.)

For builtin toolbar icons, your only choices are big/small and hollow/filled versions of the Fluent UI icons, or the old small-only standard icons. (That “standard icon” set has not, as far as I can remember, been published in a large-icon version. In Notepad++ 7.9.5 and earlier, before there were the “Fluent UI” icons, there were the ancient “small icons” and “big icons” and the “standard icons” (which were small, even then); I just double-checked v6.5 from 2013, the oldest copy I have downloaded right now, and the “standard” ones were only small, even then.)

You can customize the icons, if you don’t like any of the four Fluent options or the “standard icon” set. The Toolbar Customization section of the User Manual explains how to do that, and even provides a link to a zipfile with a copy of the ancient “big icons”, which are now called the “legacy” icons. But that download doesn’t come with big versions of the “standard icons”, either… so if that’s what you wanted, you’d still be out-of-luck. It might be possible to use image editor software and grab the “standard icons” out of the Notepad++ source code, and scale them from 16x16 .ico files to 32x32 .ico files – but I don’t know of anyone who has done that and made them public.

@PeterJones
Ok thanks for your help. Probably will just use the last known supported version. Nice to know though that there may be a way to use a newer version.

@guy038 said in Maintain Indent While Pasting Multiple Lines:
This thread is a bit dated, the setting is now under
Settings > Preferences > Indentation
Everything else is as @guy038 said.

If you know the hex code for a symbol, I prefer to use the HTMLTag plugin to automatically convert XML character encodings into their corresponding characters (e.g., 
 will automaticaly convert to the LF character after you hit SPACE).

@Berend-Engelbrecht
Would you mind sharing your graphics adapter information (Brand/model/Driver Version etc.) in this thread? If we can collect as many infos as possible about Graphic adapters affected by the DirectWrite problem, it might show a pattern allowing clues about the cause.

@guy038, @Alan-Kilborn, and others

Congratulations on discovering that Ctrl+F3 trick to bypass the 1024 character selection to the Find-what field limit.

That prompted me to do a test.

I created a 5000 character long ruler line with ________10________20________30 … ______4980______4990______5000. I duplicated that line a few times. I put the caret on one of the lines and did Ctrl+F3. Notepad++ immediately jumped to the next line and there’s a bunch of text selected. I did Ctrl+C to load the selected text into the copy/paste buffer, and pasted to a blank line in the area below my list of 5000 character rulers. I saw that the new line is 2047 characters long and runs from ________10________20________30 … ______2030______2040______2

My first thought was, “wait, I thought the search limit was 2046 characters. Apparently the quick search thing using Ctrl+F3 will search for up to 2047 character patterns.”

I verified that a reverse quick search using Ctrl+Shift+F3 also allows or up to 2047 character patterns.

I moved the caret to a blank line (it can be any blank area) and did Ctrl+F to activate the normal find dialog. I see that Find what is populated and that it has 2027 characters in the Find what field. I click [Find Next] which selects some stuff, Esc to close the dialog, Ctrl+C to load the text I found into the copy/paste buffer, and paste that to a new line.

The search using [Find Next] matched the first 2046 characters that were in the Find-what field.

Anyway, that’s excellent that we can have regular expressions that are up to 2046 characters long and to get them into the Find-what field without using copy/paste. The procedure will be to:

Select the long regexp Crtl+F3 or Shift+Crtl+F3 Move the caret to a blank area so that the caret is not within nor touching a word. Crtl+F and the Find-what field will be populated.

This will be handy as something I frequently do is to load the replacement string into the copy/paste buffer, select the search pattern, Ctrl+H, tab down to the Replace with field, and Ctrl+V to fill in the replacement pattern.

That works for search patterns for up to 1024 characters and now with @guy038’s Ctrl+F3 trick I can get around the 1024 character limit and don’t need to use the copy/paste buffer to do that.

A few weeks ago I took a look at the Notepad++ source code to better understand the 1024 and 2046 character limits.

The 1024 character limit comes from the default value for the Minimum size for auto-checking in-selection setting. It’s a Notepad++ bug as that setting is unrelated to the the limit for auto-loading the selection into the Find what field. Unfortunately, the fix is not easy as the internal constant that has the 1024 is used in several different way.

The 2046 character limit seems to be either a different Notepad++ bug or a Scintilla limit or bug. The buffers that hold search and replace patters are 2028 16-bit characters long. The pattern is NUL terminated meaning we should be able to have up to 2047 character long patterns. The code has an extra subtraction somewhere that causes 2047 to be 2046. The extra subtract seems to be buried in the Notepad++ logic that’s dealing with Scintilla.

While looking at the 2046 character issue I saw that the pattern buffer uses 16-bit wide characters. I verified that you can search for up to 2046 16-bit characters such as ⛱⛱⛱...⛱⛱⛱ (U+26F1). If you search for an extended Unicode character such as 🦎🦎🦎...🦎🦎🦎 (U+1F98E or the surrogate pair \x{D83E}\x{DD8E} ) then you will be limited to 1023 characters.

I did discover some weirdness with Ctrl+F3.

Using Ctrl+F3 when the caret is within a short string such as ⛱⛱⛱⛱⛱⛱⛱⛱ seems to do nothing. The text is not loaded into the Find what field. I suspect that ⛱ is not a word character. ❽ (U+277D) is a word character but Ctrl+F3 gets confused by ❽❽❽...❽❽❽ as it seems to be selecting and searching for the entire line. I was able to do 5000 character search matches using long strings of ❽❽❽...❽❽❽. As I knew the buffers are 2024 words long I suspected there was a buffer overflow.

@Steve-Lawther

I think that the EnhanceAnyLexer plugin and a corresponding regex, e.g. Item\d+\w+ would be easiest here.

@PeterJones Thank for the fast response! I will give that a try.

@Coises

Thank you for your suggestion.
This seems to be the only way of solving the problem.

Sad to say that a feature-rich editor like NP++ has no separate option for that.

To achieve this, the user has to fiddle around unintuitively outside of NP++. Not very elegant

Thanks anyway

@Brian-Edgeley ,

Surely someone has mentioned this before?

If it didn’t work for anyone, then yes, obviously, someone would have mentioned it before. The fact that no one has mentioned it (or very few) indicates that, in reality, it works for the vast majority of people who use it.

I use it on a daily basis, and have for years, and it’s always worked for me, both on my old Win10 setups I used to use and my new Win11 machine.

If you want help debugging why it’s not working for you, please go into your ?-menu and choose Debug Info, then copy that information and paste it here – that will give us specific version-info about your N++, as well as other useful information that helps us understand your setup. Once we know a little more about your setup, we might be able to start giving insight or hazarding guesses.

The biggest and most obvious culprit – so frequent that it actually has a paragraph in the Online User Manual – is that if you’re running Notepad++ “as Admin” (it would have “Administrator” in the title bar, and the Debug Info would tell us if you were, even if you didn’t know), then the shell extension’s Edit with Notepad++ action might not be able to open the file into Notepad++.

Beyond that, I would probably suggest trying to un-register the shell extension then re-register it (both those steps are here in the User Manual)… but before I could give specifics to help you through that process, I would need to know what version you were using and where your Notepad++ was installed (again, through the Debug Info)

So, other than “check to make sure Notepad++ is not in Administrator mode”, I cannot give any solid advice until you share your Debug Info.

@Hashir-Maher ,

I didn’t understand it two years ago when @sky-247 suggested it, and I still don’t understand it now that you reply saying it was a good idea: how does changing font size or zoom level change whether the “jump to next/prev bookmark” takes you to the middle or the top of the screen?

I mean, I can understand that when zoomed fully in, that there are so few lines that the “middle” and the “top” are close to each other.
2280b82f-16c2-477a-85f2-c24580232355-image.png

But when you zoom back to normal, it’s still a few lines from the top, rather being at the top, like was requested. And I don’t see how you can make “jumping to bookmarks feel a lot smoother” using zooming in.

And if you zoom out, it’s the exact opposite of what the original poster requested in 2020, in that the middle, where it jumps to, is even farther from being at the top of the screen. I mean, if it’s a short enough file, then all the bookmarks will be “near” the top, but it will be unreadable:
13efed98-64fb-412b-bd31-abc1a3fc8074-image.png
, and when you return to normal zoom, the window might not be anywhere near the bookmark you just jumped to, so it makes the zoom-out version even more useless than the zoom-in version.

Can you explain why you think that @sky-247’s suggestion is at all helpful for the original question of how to show the jumped line at the top of the screen?

@Alan-Kilborn said in Some functions not shown in function list:

There’s also a sample macro called “Trim Trailing Whitespace and Save” or something close to that, that conveniently does the action every time you save (well, every time you run the macro, which, if assigned to your favorite save-keycombo, e.g. Ctrl+s, will do it).

I used Ctrl+S remapped to Macros > Trim Trailing and Save for years before starting to use editorconfig – and actually I still use that mapping, because I don’t have a .editorconfig file at the root directory of all my drives, so there are still times when the editorconfig plugin doesn’t know to trim trailing for me. Since I almost exclusively use the keystroke vs the toolbar or menu command for my Save, I (almost) always get the trailing removed when I save.

@Terry-R

Thank you…
it was disable… Why? i don’t know but it’s ok now…
;-)

@xomx said in Unable to see Data in the Notepad++:

I’d like to ask the affected users here, for which switching the DirectWrite OFF helped - what OS, graphics card and version of its drivers are they using?

E.g. post: Windows 10, Nvidia GeForce xyz, 2/24/2023 30.0.14.7430

(you can find such info e.g. by WinKey+R, type there devmgmt.msc -> OK, and check the Display Adapters > doubleclick on an adapter > Driver tab)

I have a NVidia RTX driver and also an odd one: "Parsec Virtual Display Adapter"Driver. I’m suspecting that the parsec display might be the guilty one…

Downvoted because there was a spam link on the comma between the C: and D: near the end.

This is most likely pure AI fabrication, or at least human-made junk to justify the spam link.

However, on the off-chance that AI or human derived their spam wrapper from some real report they found somewhere, I am leaving this “report” here, in case someone can replicate the “findings”.

update:

Notepad++ v8.6.4 (32-bit)
…
Plugins: Explorer 1.9.1, JSON Viewer 2.5

N++ v8.6.4 was from Feb 2024, but Explorer 1.9.1 was from May 2020. I am dubious that a user would be updating Notepad++, but not the Explorer plugin, over that long of a timeframe.

Also, as far as I can tell from the public releases, “JSON Viewer 2.5” will not be coming out for another few years (since it’s currently at 2.1.1, and was at 2.0.2 in 2022), so that’s a non-existent plugin version, and more evidence that this entire report is an hallucination.