@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.

@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.

@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).

@Ekopalypse thanks for the info. I was hoping to avoid having to create custom autocomplete but cant have everything :)

Title says Win7 – works on Windows 11 too

A bit late, but this post was the key to getting things working on Windows 11 for me. I had stuck with the 32-bit version for years and had installed it on a non-default disk. When I upgraded to the 64-bit version everything related to the right click menu stopped working.

Using regedit to insure that this key pointed at my 64-bit install got things right.
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Applications\notepad++.exe\shell\open\command]

double click on default to see the actual key if you haven’t used regedit before.

Came here to say I got same issue when using remote session and the target laptop lid is closed. Notepad stops rending the opened files. This is on Windows 10 and notepad version is 8.8.1.

@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., &#10; 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.

@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