@Ian-Hicks Hit a few too many speedbumps, so retraced my steps and found a solution using MSXML. Output isn’t as elegant, but it’s readable, so provides a solution to my problem

Hi, @mark-anderson, @peterjones, @alan-kilborn and All,

Phew ! More fear than harm ! See my very last issue_comment :

https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issues/17227#issuecomment-3591646890

BR

guy038

@Jeff-Esposito

Hi, I had the same problem.

In my case it was (alsmost certain) caused by heavily editing the DarkMode-Default theme that got a size of over 500Mb. I Suspect it was caused by using many custom colors.

It has nothing to do with BitDefender. We have the BitDefender Endpoint Security running on our machines too.

Switching from dark mode Default to another theme completely solved the problem for me.
\Editing that theme with default colors did not slow down startup.
Give it a try.

Tip:

You can keep your personal theme by coping and renaming it. It will them show up in the themes
list. You can find the themes in C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Notepad++

Gerard Kiekens
(Key-Can Computer Services The Netherlands)

Hi, @peterjones and All,

Peter, actually, we were not talking about the same thing !

On GitHub, under the tree structure notepad-plus-plus/PowerEditor/Test/FunctionList/perl, there are two files :

unitTest ( named unitTest.txt )

unitTest.expected.result ( named unitTest.expected.result )

And indeed, after downloading the unitTest.txt file and opening it within N++, it did automatically recognized this .txt file as a Perl file, due to the first line #!/usr/bin/env perl

Now, in the functionList sub-folder of my portable 887_x64 installation, I copied three files :

perl.xml of N++ v8.8.6, that I renamed perl_886.xml

perl.xml of N++ v8.8.7, that I just re-copied as perl_887.xml

perl.xml, from your last link ( https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/blob/3d829d9a311fa05f77479b79b5b340e05986a52e/PowerEditor/installer/functionList/perl.xml ), that I renamed Perl_NEW.xml

Then, after closing N++, from a CMD prompt, I ran, successively, the three commands :

• D:\887_x64\functionList>copy perl_886.xml perl.xml • D:\887_x64\functionList>copy perl_887.xml perl.xml • D:\887_x64\functionList>copy perl_NEW.xml perl.xml

I re-started N++, each time, with current tab = unitTest.txt and opening the View > Function List feature, I did verify that :

The Function List panel with perl_886 was immediate but quite incomplete

The Function List panel with perl_887 was correct but with a slight delay at opening time

The Function List panel with perl_NEW was correct and with no delay at all !

Therefore, I now have the necessary equipment to test the Perl function list regexes and imagine possible new regexes. But just for myself, because I doubt I’ll find anything better than your solution !

Best Regards,

guy038

@evdmade01 said in Plugin Manager:

Plugin Manager - what happened with it, where did it go?

The old Plugin Manager plugin hasn’t been compatible with Notepad++ in 7 years. In v7.6 (in 2018), it was replaced by the built-in Plugins Admin tool. Use that built-in tool, not the old, unmaintained, advertising-supported Plugin Manager.

@Doreen-Ammons

It is possible. There are a few ways to do it, depending on your exact circumstances. Here is one way:

Open a new, empty tab.

If you don’t see line numbers at the left, go to Settings | Preferences… | Margins/Border/Edge and check Display in the Line Number box at the top right.

Press and hold the Enter key until you have exactly 200 lines.

Edit | Select All (or Ctrl+A).

Open Edit | Column Editor….

Select Number to Insert; set the Format to Dec. the numbers to 1, 1, 1 and Leading to None.

Click OK. You should now see the numbers 1 to 200 in your file.

The column editor will leave extraneous (for this purpose) blanks after the one and two digit numbers. Use Edit | Blank Operations | Trim Trailing Space to remove them.

From your original source, copy the fixed part of the text; that is, everything from “goldplate” to “1.2.3.” including the point but not including the final 1.

Go back to tab with the list of numbers from 1 to 200. Click at the very beginning of the list, at the left of the 1. Scroll to the bottom using the mouse (not the keyboard), hold down Shift and Alt, and click at the left of the 200. You should see a thin, blinking line running at the left of all your lines.

Paste. You’ll see the text you copied added before each number.

You can now Select All, copy, and paste this back into your original file.

nice, it really hepled me, thank you again)

@NolanNolan said in Standard ANSI and code still change to something else:

But really weird that using Microsofts own notepad.exe that comes with a standard windows installation makes windows search not detect characters in txt files that belongs to the installation language of the OS.

Perhaps not quite as strange as it might first appear.

Support for Unicode in Windows dates back to the first release of Windows NT in 1993. (NT was a “business” operating system; it took another eight years or so to get Unicode into “consumer” systems.) The thing is, Windows chose to support 16-bit characters: UCS-2, which later became UTF-16. UTF-8 wasn’t even presented publicly until 1993, and it took many more years for it to become popular. Most early adopters of Unicode, like Windows, used 16-bit “wide” characters.

So, for a long time, in Windows “Unicode” meant UTF-16. Windows XP (2001) introduced code page 65001 for UTF-8, but it was only useful in conversion functions and console sessions. In Windows 10 Version 1903 (May 2019), it became possible to set UTF-8 (65001) as the system code page; however, that doesn’t (yet, in 2025 at least) do as much as you might hope it would, and it can precipitate odd behavior in software. (I tested your specific case: setting Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support does not change how search in Windows Explorer interprets files without a byte order mark.)

Files using legacy (“ANSI”) encodings are too common to ignore, but, as @PeterJones pointed out in his earlier post in this thread, there is no completely reliable way to distinguish an “ANSI” encoding from UTF-8. Windows chose to use the byte order mark (already in use in UTF-16 files) to signal when a file is UTF-8. Windows simply does not recognize a file without a byte order mark as Unicode.

Notepad++ uses byte order marks, too, but it also recognizes when a file has a very high likelihood of being UTF-8 (without a byte order mark). This is possible because the details of UTF-8 encoding make it highly unlikely that a legacy text file will “accidentally” also be a valid UTF-8 file — unless it is very short, has been intentionally crafted to trigger false detection, or contains only ASCII characters. (Since ASCII characters are represented identically in UTF-8 and in legacy code pages, the last case only matters if you edit a file which contained only ASCII characters so that it contains one or more non-ASCII characters. In that case, it is important to set your intended encoding depending on how the file will be used.)

What you’re confronting is the difference between how Windows detects UTF-8 (must have a byte order mark) and how Notepad++ detects UTF-8 (valid UTF-8 byte sequence, which is statistically highly unlikely to be a legacy encoding).

There is no good solution to this without inventing a time machine and changing decisions that were made over three decades ago.

Well… no good solution that does not sacrifice reasonable backward compatibility. I consider that one of Windows’ best features, and I admire Microsoft for sticking to it. Twenty-year old programs can still run on current versions of Windows. I hate the culture of “If it’s not constantly maintained and upgraded, junk it!” that’s overtaken most of the computing world. A job once done well should stay done. (I suspect this has a lot to do with Microsoft’s dominance in business applications.) Not everyone shares my view.

@PeterJones Thank you!

@PeterJones I think I found the culprit behind this.

Looks like I had my Avast autoupdater to ON, and probably it was the reason behind quiet updates for both Notepad++ and my Mozilla Thunderbird 42.

It became a routine for me to reinstall old versions over and over and over agian.

Thank you for your response.

Really appreciate your help and detailed approach.

@guy038 said in How to Print Pretty with missing close tags.:

Let’s start from your solution

I’d hardly call it “my” solution. In that I used your generic find/replace-in-region formula, and plugged in reasonable values for the “variables” from that generic formula. The whole point of that generic formula is to make it really easy for anyone to just plug in their BSR/ESR/FR into the formula, and have it “just work”, without having to optimize or tweak.

If I run, successively,

As @Doctor-Rashir said here, “There are many closed tags”… In other words, it’s not just SONRQ and SIGNOMSGSRQV1, and trying to manually run a separate regular expression for each of the “many closed tags” is thus not practical. That is why I went to a script to automate it.

@PeterJones
Thank you for the reply. Yes, I understood that inference. I was hoping there was additional tweaks to try. Yes, I could do a reply. It was triggered on a very minor edit. Maybe the site support would be interested in the issue. But it’s not important to me now.

@PeterJones

i have to hand it to you this worked, thank you :-)

I couldnt find this description elsewhere, i tested all the 3 thirdparty apps, wthy didnt work though

I seems to have missed the reg addition of defaulticon should be in the string sith notepad++

best Nolan

When the Fill Find Field with Selected Text option, in settings, is unchecked, and the user invokes Select And Find …, perhaps the program should (simply) run the code for the “volatile” version of the command.

(I should have said this in my previous post.)

@Rick-Kosters

You can try the free Agent Ransack utility from https://www.mythicsoft.com
It works with .doc, .docx and .pdf files too.

@me

I printed out a cookie recipe in NP++ and LO Writer

Try to be more explicit. I actually use LibreOffice and, until @PeterJones explicitly stated it in his response, I had no idea what you were talking about when you said “LO”.

@JuergenBelle ,

Further to what @h-jangra said, since N++ v8.8.6, you can just paste your multi-line text into the Replace, and use the Search @h-jangra suggested, and you don’t need the plugin at all…

If your replacement has parentheses () or dollar signs $, it might not work as you expect, so you might have to escape them, as described in the user manual (https://npp-user-manual.org/docs/searching/#substitutions)

@guy038

More good information. Thank you!

Barry

@Alan, listen to @PeterJones when he says to scan your computer for viruses. TextShaping.dll is commonly used in DLL sideloading exploits, and if your executables are trying to call it when it resides in a place it doesn’t belong (your Notepad++ directory), then there’s a good chance your computer has been hacked.

That doesn’t mean you should freak out just yet, just take some steps to ensure that you’re not hacked.

All the gup.exe does is to check if there is a newer version than specified by the string input parameter is available. It does not handle the update itself. You would have to code it for yourself.

For example like this in Powershell 5.1 for the 64bit version of Notepad++.

[string]$ScriptFolder = $PSCommandPath | Split-Path -Parent $Notepad = Get-ItemProperty -LiteralPath 'HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Notepad++' $InstalledVersion = $Notepad.DisplayVersion $UpdateCheck = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "https://notepad-plus-plus.org/update/getDownloadUrl.php?version=$InstalledVersion" $UpdateCheckAnswer = ([xml]$UpdateCheck.Content).GUP if ($UpdateCheckAnswer.NeedToBeUpdated -eq 'yes') { $Filename = $UpdateCheckAnswer.Location.Split('/')[-1] Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $UpdateCheckAnswer.Location -OutFile "$ScriptFolder\$Filename" & "$ScriptFolder\$Filename" '/S /closeRunningNpp' }