@archerarcher1 I will suggest LongPathTool to solve this error.

@PeterJones
on the screenshot above Reduce option is already pressed though.
Max tab label length truncates text, which is not the behavior i want to restore - i want the tabs with short names to not have this big gap at the end.

That said, it seems that the “enable pin tab feature” was the culprit, as disabling it seems to have restored the desired tab size behavior.

There still is some extra spacing before the close button though:

2bb5dad1-4a85-4bd0-8df8-768e93562693-image.png
629bde33-102c-4a09-a960-60ded9dcd809-image.png

@Nppenjoyr ,

See this post

@Liam-Wright I am running the latest NPP (8.9.1) and I don’t see this setting.

@D-Kirkpatrick said in Editing the Shortcuts File:

However with this latest version there doesn’t seem to be a way to do this?

Nothing has changed regarding shortcuts.xml in the last many versions.

I know there is a copy in %appdata% but that also had my changes.

It depends on your settings, but the %AppData%\Notepad++\shortcuts.xml is the normal first place that Notepad++ will look.

if that’s not working for you:

confirm you follow the normal incantation for editing config files (ie, close all N++, open just one, edit file, save, exit and restart N++ to allow the change to take effect) if that doesn’t work, grab ?-menu’s Debug Info and share it with us share the actual XML snippet from the right shortcuts.xml file, so we can look to see if we can tell what’s wrong

update: I just re-read your post, and noticed:

When I added in the appropriate line to the XML file and saved it nothing happened and the pull down menu did not change.

You have to exit Notepad++ after saving, then restart the application. Notepad++ doesn’t just re-parse shortcuts.xml when you save it, so the menu won’t change by just hitting save on the file.

@sagradamoly-stack said in Managing the User Languages tool:

Is there any way to delete all the interim variations without losing all the work getting to a useful final result?

It depends on what you mean.

En masse? No

One at a time? Yes. In the UDL dialog, select each intermediate UDL from the drop-down, and click Remove. Since it’s likely on the order of a dozen or two, it won’t take you that long – less time than asking here took you, I’d wager.

without losing all the work

I mean, deleting the intermediate ones will obviously delete the intermediate stages. If you don’t want to lose them, but don’t want them in the N++ Language menu, use Export to save each to a separate XML file which you can then save in some backup directory, then Remove to take it out of the menu.

@George-Warriner,

My best guess is that it was referring to this conversation

@Markus-Louw ,

You mean this box?

See that X on the upper right, right where Windows dialog boxes normally have their X close symbol? You click it to close the message so that you can type.

@jterrain said in how to make tab bar appear vertically in notepad ++:

but implementation of actual vertical tabs would work better.

We have a Feature Request FAQ:
https://community.notepad-plus-plus.org/topic/15741/faq-feature-request-or-bug-report

As described in this comment, I noticed that the Search->Go to... dialog and typing do not reveal the current position if it’s in a hidden line range. This seems to me to further highlight the importance of creating a “Make current position visible” command.

@PeterJones Thanks. Changing the rendering mode to GDI, DirectWrite (retain frames), or DirectWrite (Draw to GDI DC) seems to stop the issue.

Here’s the debug info:
Notepad++ v8.9.1 (ARM 64-bit)
Build time: Jan 18 2026 - 21:12:46
Scintilla/Lexilla included: 5.5.8/5.4.6
Boost Regex included: 1_90
pugixml included: 1.15
nlohmann JSON included: 3.12.0
Path: C:\Program Files\Notepad++\notepad++.exe
Command Line:
Admin mode: OFF
Local Conf mode: OFF
Cloud Config: OFF
Periodic Backup: ON
Placeholders: OFF
Scintilla Rendering Mode: SC_TECHNOLOGY_DEFAULT (0)
Multi-instance Mode: monoInst
asNotepad: OFF
File Status Auto-Detection: cdEnabledNew (for current file/tab only)
Dark Mode: OFF
Display Info:
primary monitor: 2304x1536, scaling 150%
visible monitors count: 1
installed Display Class adapters:
0000: Description - Qualcomm® Adreno™ X1-85 GPU
0000: DriverVersion - 31.0.133.2
OS Name: Windows 11 Pro (64-bit)
OS Version: 25H2
OS Build: 26200.7628
Current ANSI codepage: 1252
Plugins:
mimeTools (3.1)
NppConverter (4.7)
NppExport (0.4)

Hi, , @russ-jones, @freemeow, @m-andre-z-eckenrode and All,

Ah… many thanks, @m-andre-z-eckenrode for your valuable input ! Thus, @russ-jones, my macros can be improved as below, just adding a final Esc key stroke :

<Macro name="End Previous NON-Blank chars" Ctrl="no" Alt="yes" Shift="no" Key="190"> <Action type="3" message="1700" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="" /> <Action type="3" message="1601" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="\S+\K(?=\s)" /> <Action type="3" message="1625" wParam="0" lParam="2" sParam="" /> <Action type="3" message="1602" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="" /> <Action type="3" message="1702" wParam="0" lParam="256" sParam="" /> <Action type="3" message="1701" wParam="0" lParam="1" sParam="" /> <Action type="0" message="2325" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="" /> </Macro> <Macro name="End Next NON-Blank chars" Ctrl="no" Alt="yes" Shift="no" Key="191"> <Action type="3" message="1700" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="" /> <Action type="3" message="1601" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="\S+\K(?=\s)" /> <Action type="3" message="1625" wParam="0" lParam="2" sParam="" /> <Action type="3" message="1602" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="" /> <Action type="3" message="1702" wParam="0" lParam="768" sParam="" /> <Action type="3" message="1701" wParam="0" lParam="1" sParam="" /> <Action type="0" message="2325" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="" /> </Macro>

BR

guy038

@Pierre-de-la-Verre said in No solution for using as Preview Handler?:

I looked around and it seems that there is no (common) way to activate / to configure the “Preview Pane” in Windows Explorer on “Win Server 2019” to display common files like logs, txts and so on.

Notepad++ doesn’t have a preview pane natively. Are you using one or more plugins? If so, which plugin(s)?

Or are you saying that you would like to tell Windows OS to use Notepad++ as the preview tool for those kinds of files? My guess is that would require that Notepad++ add hooks to handle whatever special message Windows sends to request generating the preview. Yeah, I found this 2019 feature request that requested adding such a feature. You could go upvote that request… Also, there’s a discussion from 2021 about the possibility of this feature, as well.

(On Github I found a fork which offers this, but I would like to prefer a solution with / within the “official version of NotePad++”)

I couldn’t find that fork easily. If you pointed a link to that fork in the official feature request issue, it might give a volunteer the context and information needed to be able to try to incorporate it into Notepad++.

@PeterJones thanks a lot… I was not able to find that myself :-)

The Open With extension is not the Edit with Notepad++ extension. The later is NppShell.

Open a cmd prompt and enter:

reg delete "HKCU\Software\Classes\Applications\notepad++.exe"

Press Return key and if no error, then it will prompt to delete the key and reply with yes.

Open With creates this key and some others. Removing this key removes the orphaned Open With entry of Notepad++.

Some installers add this key, the Notepad++ installer currently does not add this key so it does not remove it on uninstall.

The duplicate entry is something else. Try:

reg query "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.ini" /s

and will print information about the entries to discover more details about the entries. You may see something like Applications\other.exe and if another ophaned entry, can use a similar command to remove it:

reg delete "HKCU\Software\Classes\Applications\other.exe"

Always use care with the registry. Ensure the commands are correct before executing them.

@mpheath Cheers thank you for the detailed explanation! i will give this a go.

@Omar-A ,

Search has a “regular expression” mode which will be able to search for anything matching a pattern. Since I assume you want to also delete the matching </span> to go with it, then I believe a regex like the following will work:
FIND = <span data-path-to-node[^>]*>(.*?)</span>
REPLACE = $1
SEARCH MODE = Regular Expression

That worked on the first three spans in your example (and would’ve worked on the fourth if the final /span> wasn’t missing the <)

@Alan-Kilborn

Thanks for the suggestion, though I think .lineUp() is sufficient for my purposes in this case, since I will need to repeatedly go up the same number of lines, and column isn’t a concern because I’ll always be landing on blank lines.

A very old thread I know, but this may help someone else.

I was trying to use Pretty Print to format some MSOffice XML (from a PPT template that had been renamed as a zip). My initial attempts didn’t work “Nothing happened”. I eventually solved the problem when I realised that it wouldn’t work on files still stored in the zip. Notepad++ could read the files and displayed them as 2 looooog lines so I assumed (wrongly) that I could Preetify, edit and write back. In retrospect I should have realised that this was never going to work as the “file” I was working on was a temporary copy.

Solution: Extract the file from the zip (as opposed to view the file in the zip without extracting properly) , Preetify (which worked of course), edit, save, copy back into the zip overwriting the original.

An interesting corollary: Using the Windows Explorer zip functionality to open and view the contents (as opposed to extracting them) which uses a rather long temporary folder prefix - Pretty Print didn’t work.
Using 7Zip which uses a much shorter temporary folder prefix - Pretty Print did work. Obviously, I was still working in a temporary copy which wouldn’t get saved back.

@mpheath. Thank you so much. You found a simple and very effective solution. It works 100 percent. Now I see the desired cursor instead of the black square. Thanks again.