@Caroline ,

I am going to echo @Mark-Olson’s sentiment, but with a lot more wordy detail, because that’s the kind of answers I give here. ;-)

Notepad++ does not have a native compare function. Since you are saying you are using Notepad++ to compare, I have to conclude that you are using either the old Compare plugin or its much-improved successor ComparePlus. (If you are still using ComparePlugin, remove it and install ComparePlus, as that is the one that is getting continued support going forward.)

Unfortunately, even ComparePlus doesn’t have any feature to export its comparison to any format (whether it be something “standard”, like normal diff output or a patch file, or something unusual like a custom spreadsheet format)

Just so you know, Notepad++ is a text editor, and Excel natively works with binary data files. There is a text-based intermediary – the CSV format. But I cannot think of any standard CSV-based format that would be reasonable for a difference/comparison (ie, I have never heard of diff or similar tools outputting to a CSV format), so I doubt there’s anything ready-made that exists for Notepad++, any other text editor, or any command-line-based text-comparison tool like diff.

Since no one here is likely to know what are “CRIMS codes” or what “RPA running [in Excel]” is, or what format that spreadsheet-based tool would want the “differences” in for comparison, there’s not much else we can do at this point.

If you were to give us some short dummy “CRIMS”, along with a table

| header 1 | h2 | h3 | |---|---|---| | A1 | B1 | C1 | | A2 | B2 | C2 | | A3 | B3 | C3 | header 1 header2 header3 A2 B2 C2 A3 B3 C3 A4 B4 C4

And show us what pieces from the CRIMS codes (or the “comparison of CRIMS codes”) map into each of those cells.

If it’s not too complicated, someone might be able to create a script for the PythonScript plugin that would take one or more CRIMS files and create the text-based CSV spreadsheet, which you could then open in Excel and use the “RPA” tool. And if the CRIMS codes and/or the difference format that you want is too complicated, it might be beyond the scope of free help in a text editor forum; so don’t be surprised if no one is able to help you with that, unless it’s just a simple mapping from a simple data format.

(However, if comparing the differences between two CRIMS codes is something that people in your field often do with an RPA running in Excel, it would very much surprise me if there weren’t already tools – either command-line or Excel/VBA-based – that didn’t do the comparison or otherwise convert the CRIMS codes into the right format to read in Excel. In which case, it’s not a question for Notepad++ users.)

@Kunal-Mehta

The problem with all these different “cloud” drives is that they don’t use a standard protocol, which makes it difficult to support multiple of them.

@Maxim-Rodin ,

Settings > Preferences > Print, uncheck Print Line Number

@PeterJones said in in correct version reporting:

some insight as to why the Windows program/features install version isn’t getting updated for you.

@eli-rosen said in in correct version reporting:

user for almost 20 years,

The following will be only my guess.

Since @eli-rosen uses the N++ installers for so long, maybe he previously used there also a v7.9.1 x64 one, but then he has started to use that Automox (sorry, IDK it) and it can do whatever stuff, so maybe it’s simply forgetting/blocking to update the corresponding Registry item.

It shouldn’t be a remnant from a previously installed 32-bit v7.9.1. In such a case there should be a separate uninstall-item visible (with a corresponding Registry hive HKLM\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Notepad++\)

@Maxim-Rodin said in How do I convert a Notepad++ texst file to a PDF file with the vertical spacing bvetween the lines staying the same?:

The book uses box drawing characters, which require the vertical spacing between lines to be very small. All of this needs to be exported in PDF format, but when I open the resulting PDF file, the vertical spacing is very high. Is there any way to fix this, either in Notepad++ or in the finished file?

The problem might be the font you are using. When I use Fira Code as my font, print some box-drawing to PDF, and then open it in my free SumatraPDF viewer, the spacing looks reasonable (the boxes all connect) – the following is a screenshot from my PDF viewer

33fe7d55-14fc-41e1-bfb3-d121f83b1563-image.png
… So it’s showing them still connected.

(Here’s NPP screenshot before I printed to PDF:
ee7458bc-e218-417f-8fcd-5235c2f764ce-image.png
… it shows connected there, too)

Also, if that’s not working for you, if you take your text file in Notepad++ and use Language > M > MS-DOS Style (which is the lexer that’s useful for the old ASCII art .nfo-style files… though .nfo doesn’t seem to be in my default extension list anymore, which surprised me), Notepad++ actually changes the line spacing to make the lines closer together. So if changing fonts doesn’t work for you, try printing when in the Language = MS-DOS Style.

Finally, the Settings > Preferences > MISC has some “DirectWrite” or “Rendering mode” settings (depending on which version of Notepad++ you are using) – you can try the various options available to you, as that influences how Notepad++ and the OS interface when dealing with fonts, so that can influence it. You may need to exit and restart Notepad++ for the DirectWrite setting change to take effect.

For example, in my tests with Fira Code font, if I had Language = “MS-DOS Style” but “Rendering Mode” set to “Direct Write (default)”, I would see gaps, even though in Language = “None (normal text)”, I wouldn’t see gaps. If I change to “Rendering Mode” = “GDI (most compatible)” (or DirectWrite=off in the old nomenclature) and restart and look at the box drawing in “MS-DOS Style”, it goes back to being connected. But my experience may be different than yours, because as I said, when I use FiraCode in my normal setup, the box drawing characters are properly connected.

In general, Notepad++ tries to print essentially what you see (in terms of font size, line spacing, etc), so if you see the box drawing connected when looking at it on-screen in Notepad++, it should print to PDF (or physical printer) that way, too. If not, it might be your printer driver, or you might need to change your font and/or DirectWrite settings.

@Nostra-Damus said in Create File? message:

but don’t have a ‘contextMenu’ folder in the Notepad++ folder, is there anywhere I can download it from? I have got the latest portable version off github but it is not in that either.

The portable edition does not come with the Shell Extension DLL because the Shell Extension is by definition not portable (it gets registered with your OS; one of the primary points of portable editions of software is to keep them from making changes to your OS configuration and to keep themselves limited to whatever directory you happen to be running them from)

The only way I have ever tried getting the shell extension is to run the installer (unfortunately, the installer is not one of the ones where you can change the filename to xyz.zip and just browse it like a zipfile, so you cannot easily extract from the installer without running it). And you seem to want the portable, not the installed version. However, it should be noted: you can still use the installer, and give it your alternate install directory of C:\Utils\Notepad++\ and you can choose Don't use %AppData% in the options on the last page of the installer:
7dae6d44-f65e-4048-872d-cd58d2b61a26-image.png

However, if you don’t want to run the installer at all, the repo for the Shell Extension is publicaly visible at https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/nppShell/ … its “releases” only seems to share the source code, not the built DLL, but if you go to the most recent GitHub Actions CI_Build (https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/nppShell/actions/workflows/CI_build.yml) – click on the most recent (topmost) run in the main list: if it is recent enough, it should have some artifacts attached, and you could grab the 64-bit artifact (the one with x64 in the name). You can extract the DLL from that artifact zipfile, and then create C:\Utils\Notepad++\contextMenu\ folder and put the extracted DLL there.

But honestly, that’s a lot of work when really all you needed was to add the quotes to get "%1" in your existing registry entries. Since you’ve already confirmed that works, I’d probably recommend just sticking with that.

@Nachum-Shmilovitz
Do you have any plugins installed? A plugin might be responsible.

It’s also possible that the SQL lexer is causing this slow performance. You can disable this lexer (removing all syntax highlighting) by selecting Language -> None (Normal Text) from the Notepad++ main menu.

@guy038 said:

the site’s ability to highlight any sub-section of the regex in green is really awesome

https://jmrware.com/articles/2010/dynregexhl/DynamicRegexHighlighter.html

@PeterJones said in Regex find and replace string in different types of brackets:

@Евгений-К ,

One way to do it simultaneously is

FIND = (>Some String<)|("Some String")
REPLACE = (?1>New String<)(?2"New String")
SEARCH MODE = Regular Expression

But that’s “annoying” because you have to repeat the Some String and New String in the FIND and REPLACE.

There are some fancy tricks using capture groups, either named or numbered, and control-flow assertions, to make sure that things balance correctly, and it will only match .

FIND = (?'startwrap'(?'angled'>)|(?'quoted'"))\KSome String(?'endwrap'(?=(?('quoted')")(?('angled')<)))
REPLACE = New String
SEARCH MODE = Regular expression

But as you can see, the FIND becomes rather complicated to save the “expense” of having Some String and New String twice. (You could theoretically do it with numbered capture groups instead, but getting the counts right, especially as you edit to make a third pair like {Some String}, would cause problems, so I used named groups so there was no ambiguity in the future. I will leave the “numbered group” version as an exercise to the interested reader.)

So that’s two ways. Which is best depends on which you understand, and whether it’s going to be expanded in the future and/or done often. The most important thing with regex is that you understand what it’s doing, so that you don’t mess up your data.

If you don’t understand a “single regex version” but can get it done in two simple search-and-replace that you fully understand, then two simple is probably better for you. (If it’s something you will be doing often, you can record the two search-and-replace into a macro, so that you can just play that macro in the future.)

@PeterJones, thank you very much for your advice!
I look at the options you suggested and once again I am convinced that RegEx was definitely not created by people and not for people :):):)
Way #1 (captured group) is absolutely clear to me. I myself thought that it was necessary to act somehow through the groups, but I could not understand how.

And as you correctly noted - this way in terms of labor costs is not much more efficient than the method without RegEx. The old and new lines have to be written twice.

The second way is also clear to me, but only in general terms. This option is a very good warm-up for the mind. And I will definitely save this option for the future.

Hello, @alan-kilborn, and All,

Alan, you’ve just understood all my stuff quite correctly and even more regarding your last example with $+{Test} and $+{foo}, whose I did not think of !

Best Regards,

guy038

@Aria-James,

Recommended plugins for C/C++ syntax highlighting, auto-indentation, or even code suggestions for Arduino.

Syntax highlighting occurs without plugins in Notepad++. You can set Settings > Style Configurator > Language: C++ to have user ext.: = ino so that Arduino sketches automatically get associated with C++ language.

Further, you can set the USER KEYWORDS # > user-defined-keywords per my post here to add the Arduino-specific keywords to the syntax highlighter.

Notepad++ does some auto-indentation natively: see Settings > Preferences > Indentation > Indent Settings = cpp to control tabs-vs-spaces on a per-language basis, and the Auto-indent = basic vs advanced which applies globally throughout Notepad++ (described in more detail here in the User Manual). But it’s not super-fancy, and is only “as you add new lines”, so it won’t clean previous code. @Michael-Vincent shares an example script for the NppExec plugin that is able to run an external “pretty print” utility for multiple languages depending on file extension in this post: his script does it for C, HTML, Perl, and Python, but once you understand what you shared, you could definitely call one for a different language (like C++: I am betting that most c pretty-printers are really c++ pretty-printers, too).

Code suggestions – there is some auto-completion, but it won’t go as far as code suggestions (and it’s definitely not going to be a copilot AI or anything like that).

Is there a way to integrate serial monitor output or debugging processes within Notepad++ or via external tools? Is there a recommended workflow that allows me to combine Notepad++ with the Arduino IDE or PlatformIO for compiling and uploading, while primarily coding in Notepad++?

I’ve never tried anything like that, so maybe someone else will be able to give more advice on that end.

@PeterJones said in What makes notepad++ capable of making an html ???:

…

HTML Tag = makes writing HTML easier

Just so no one is disappointed, the original and primary use case for that plugin is actually reading (X/HT)ML, i.e., by making DOM trees easier to navigate. More recent versions do have additional features that may be useful in writing web documents, but it cannot, for example, scaffold an HTML page or insert markup snippets.

A better plugin for (simple) HTML generation would be WebEdit.

There’s also jn-npp-emmet, a JavaScript extension for the jN plugin (a.k.a “jn-npp-plugin”), which ought to be able to generate any kind markup that emmet can.

@Michael-Goessmann-Matos ,

When Notepad++ started enabling DirectWrite by default a few versions ago (v8.6, in Nov 2023, though it was accidentally not mentioned in the v8.6 Change list), that would have enabled any fonts that have “ligatures” available to actually use those ligatures. (The Fira Code font page describes what “ligatures” are, and what benefit they give)

But that change was more than a year ago… so either you were slow to upgrade, or you previously had an older version that got upgraded without changing your setting (if you originally had DirectWrite off, and upgraded to a version that had it on by default, it would not generally overwrite your previously-saved setting).

So you have two options to not have ligatures:

either choose a weaker font that doesn’t have ligatures: so not “Fira Code”; maybe something like “Deja Vu Sans Mono”, which was my old favorite before I learned about “Fira Code”, and does not have ligatures. You can also search the forum for other discussions about “ligatures”, as some of those posts list fonts that either do or don’t support ligatures.
Addenda: some of the font families that come in yes-ligature and no-ligature variants: Fira Code (has ligatures) vs Fira Mono (no ligatures); Cascadia Code (yes) vs Cascadia Mono (no). Other common coding fonts only come in one variant or the other: Deja Vu Sans Mono (no); JetBrains Mono (yes). or [as you posted while I was typing this reply], change rendering mode to GDI (most compatible) instead of one of the DirectWrite modes. this has the side-effect that it will mean it is more likely you won’t be able to see emoji or maybe some non-western scripts in your text files; if you are editing files with emoji or that come from Asia, this might be too much of a negative; if not, it’s a reasonable choice

@Alan-Kilborn

Hi, Alan, I tried this (i.e. your last suggestion) and I think it worked the first couple times I tried it, but now it has stopped working.

I have tried restarting both the software and the OS (WIndows 10). I changed both the english.xml and my newly created english_customizable.xml. The localization file changes back to English on each restart, but like I mentioned I changed that file as well, so that it has <tab-untitled-string value=“”/>.

Hello, @ottiditto, @pbarney, @peterjones and All,

A tiny piece of information : The & character is not a regex character, so the following syntax is sufficient :

FIND (?-s)^((.*? layer=")(25)(".*?>&gt;NAME.*\R))

REPLACE ${1}${2}21${4}

Best Regards,

guy038

@PeterJones

That worked! Thanks for your help!

Ken

@Paul-Cobben said in Cannot get Autocompletion to work for my own language:

What am I doing wrong?

Per the User Manual section on the autoCompletion definition file syntax (https://npp-user-manual.org/docs/auto-completion/#create-auto-completion-definition-files), with emphasis added:

The basic character set used to recognize keywords is made of letters a-z, A-Z, digits 0-9, and the underscore _. Punctuation might work for auto-completion; however, if you want to use the parameter hints, you should not use punctuation in the keyword name.

You are relying on the : at the start of the keyword and the - in the middle. This is a double-whammy against you. However, if you go to Settings > Preferences > Delimiter and set ⦿ Add your character as part of word to :- so that those two characters are more “word-like”, then restart Notepad++, it will be able to show up in the function-name autoCompletion:

6c680cbc-5b88-4169-b76d-affbf204618e-image.png

However, the parameter hint portion has two more problems:

The easy one is you need func="yes" in the <KeyWord name="..." func="yes"> tags, otherwise Notepad++ doesn’t pay attention to the overload/param elements nested in the KeyWord. This might not ever work, because the internal regex that Notepad++ uses to determine if it’s valid to prompt for function parameters refuses to work because of the - in the keyword. If I have the delimiter setting as above, and added a keyword :FUNCT_SETTEXT which has the : as the prefix but does not include the hyphen, like:<KeyWord name=":FUNCT_SETTEXT" func="yes"> <Overload retVal="void" descr="Set a value in the STATUS.DAT file."> <Param name="Section" /> <Param name="Key" /> <Param name="Value" /> </Overload> <KeyWord> then when I type :FUNCT_SETTEXT(, it will prompt with the parameter hints as well: bf355c03-a51b-45ad-b0a3-47534ee92e2d-image.png As a workaround, you could “cheat” the - limitation by defining a second keyword which includes just the stuff that comes after the - in the keyword, like,<KeyWord name="SETTEXT" func="yes"> <Overload retVal="void" descr="Set a value in the STATUS.DAT file."> <Param name="Section" /> <Param name="Key" /> <Param name="Value" /> </Overload> </KeyWord> This will allow Notepad++ to see the - as a boundary and then the SETTEXT as a separate function, which then allows for the function parameter completion, as in this screenshot: d52f6232-de08-4b85-89cc-e2b852801a90-image.png
(notice that it thinks the function is SETTEXT, not :FUNCT-SETTEXT, when doing the parameter prompting) Since punctuation isn’t guaranteed in function/parameter autoCompletion, that’s likely not going to be “fixed”, as it’s already relying on an unspecified edge case.

In conclusion, if you just want the function autocompletion for the names with leading : and embedded -, you can do that by setting the Delimiter setting to :- , and it will work as in my first screenshot. If you want parameter hints when there are not hyphens in your function name, you can get that by setting the func="yes" in your <KeyWord...> tags, and that will work as in my second screenshot. Unfortunately, you cannot get the parameter hints directly if your keyword has the - because of a limitation in the internal processing that decides when parameter hints can be shown (though you can trick it as shown in item3).