@Coises Hmm, to my knowledge the first screenshot used the exact same file as I did and just opened it in notepad, but I’ll look into that. Thank you for your help!

@Coises

WOW! Thank you so much!!!
It worked beautifully!

btw, I didn´t know your plugin so far. Thank you for sharing it for the public.

best regards

JR

@Ryzen-Virtual said in how to set the font in find and replace boxes to monospace?:

It’s getting really annoying trying to write regex with a proportional font or copy pasting from the code.

Settings | Preferences… | Searching:
check Use Monospaced font in Find dialog.

The feature request: https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issues/14546

@Hellena-Crainicu said in Is it possible to add styles and fonts in txt files, like in Ms Word (docx)?:

I want to know if it is possible to add styles and fonts in txt files, like in Ms Word (docx)?

For example, I want to add BOLD, ITALIC and Color, but without formatting the text in html or another language. I mean, I don’t want to add tags like <strong> </strong> or <i> , etc

Short answer: It is not possible.

Longer answer:

It is not possible, because what you would have would no longer be a plain text file. Plain text has no notion of formatting aside from a few control characters which have (relatively) agreed-upon meanings: mainly tabs and end-of-line characters. Aside from that, it’s just a stream of character codes, interpreted according to either a code page or a Unicode standard.

(In principle, I suppose someone could define a “code page” that included control characters for color, bold, italic, font assignment and so on. No existing software would know how to interpret it, though, and most people would agree it was no longer “plain text.”)

Files like docx have tags (or the equivalent of tags); it’s just that the program which displays and edits them interprets those tags and hides them so you see their effect instead of the tags themselves. It gives a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) experience, but that’s due to the editing application, not the file type.

Contrast this with html, which you usually edit in a text editor but display in a web browser. You’re aware of the tags when you create html, but viewers don’t see them or think about them.

Consider the form in which we type these posts. We can have italics and bold in our posts, but that’s because the forum software displays the text that way based on a simple form of tags (asterisks for italic, doubled asterisks for bold, square brackets followed by parentheses for links, and so on). We edit in plain text.

So, no software will display colors, bold, italics and the like without some sort of tags. The tags can be so simple (markdown, like these posts) that you can easily read and write them in a text editor, or so deeply encoded (pdf) that they can neither be displayed nor edited without software specifically designed for them. But they will have to be there.

I’m glad the OP was able to find a solution, and I appreciate the spirit of patience, exploration and iterative improvement that they and everyone else involved in the discussion exhibited throughout this whole process. I have nothing but good things to say about the OP’s attitude, but I still want to make this observation in case they are interested in further improving upon the solution:

While 1.5 seconds to process several thousand lines of code may seem fast, the script I posted above processes several hundred thousand lines of JSON in less than a second.

I am saying this because I believe that the OP has the personality traits of a successful programmer, and it is absolutely within their power, if they believe it is worthwhile, to learn a scripting solution that would provide better performance.

Ah, ok thanks. I am using a newer version, but I use the portable version and keep installing over previous installs. I wondered why the regex changes I was making were having no impact,

@PeterJones

Coolio! Thanks for that info. So I didn’t know what I can also use my macros with that Customize Toolbar plugin but it works great. Another new helpfully information. Thanks again!

Thank you very much.

Thank you Terry R, updating the Config.xml file did the trick.

@Norman-Eisenherz , @Brad-Stone ,

it is fixed in the v8.6.1 Release Candidate available from the announcement thread.
See point#3 in the announcement: it was a “regression” in v8.6 (which meant it was working in v8.5.8 then accidentally broken in v8.6) and is now fixed in v8.6.1.

@guy038 happy new year, all notepad++ team !! The best editor on earth !

@Cindy-Cindy said in how to do mass replacement in many files?:

Mail Merge

Notepad++ does not have a mail merge feature. Using a scripting plugin like PythonScript, it can be implemented. Just search this forum for mail merge or mailmerge and you should find an implementation provided.

@Alan-Kilborn

Yes I tries that plugin TakeNotes too but in this case I only can change my temp tab to a saved tab (save as note) what I don’t want or I can just create a new note tab and need to copy & paste the content of my temp tab into the note tab press save button and run it then with any external app I want. All in all it’s almost same like to save the file manually and just too much detour operations = no good & liquid running workflow for me. So to answer your question, the plugin is not what I’m looking for too, unfortunately. But otherwise it’s OK when I just work with those note files (when I need it) to save them directly into a custom folder. Maybe not the best solution but better than nothing. Thanks again for that tip Alan.

@Dean-Corso ,

If your PythonScript console prompt is still ... instead of >>>, you will need to enter a blank line (no whitespace) to tell the console to end the loop. It won’t run the loop until you do.

@Lupus ,

If you are in SEARCH MODE = Regular Expression, then the syntax you showed would probably have worked in certain cases. Or use .*? in the middle to make it less greedy. Or use \d+ in the middle to only allow integers (as @Mark-Olson said as I was typing).

But you were basically there.

@u20231231 said in Regular Expression Search and Replace - strip out pattern, keep number and add ".html" at the end:

Search Mode = NORMAL

???

@curya One other hint to add to what @Coises posted is to use Notepad++'s hide-lines feature.

Let’s say your files have 1000 lines each.

Line 1 Line 2 Line 3 ... Line 998 Line 999 Line 1000

Create a normal selection that spans lines 2 to 999, right click the selection, and select Hide Lines which is the last option. You will now see:

Line 1 (with a green ⮞ arrow in front of it) Line 1000 (with a green ⮜ arrow in front of it)

You can now create the column selection using lines 1 and 1000 as the guide for where to place it. The column oriented copy/paste will include the hidden lines as part of the selection.

Click either of the green arrows to unhide the lines.

@PeterJones Will do. Thank you.