@Nachum-Shmilovitz
I have never used Notepad++'s session snapshot and periodic backup feature, nor do I want Windows to decide when to install updates and restart my computer automatically (and took measures to stop it from doing so), so I have never encountered the problem of NUL char file corruption. That’s the reason why I’m not happy with the disablement of the NppSaveAsAdmin plugin, too.

My workaround is to patch the version info of the plugin’s DLL file to outwit Notepad++'s compatibility check in PluginsAdmin. This can be done with the small tool Resource Hacker. I set the version number from 1.0.211 to 1.0.212, so the plugin can be used again. After saving a file with the plugin Notepad++ shows an error dialog mentioning an invalid handle but nevertheless the file gets saved correctly.

The other option, patching Notepad++'s nppPluginList.dll file, doesn’t work because this file is signed. Any changes of this file prevents it from being loaded with Notepad++.

@Todd-Hoatson-0 said in File display using multiple fonts simultaneously?:

Also, I find it odd that Show Symbol > Show All Characters does not reveal that this character is there

It depends on the character. Unicode has quite a few characters, such as in the Combining Diacritical Marks block, that will cause odd shifts much like the " the orange dot is misplaced, overwriting some other character" that you are seeing.

Notepad++'s “show all characters” feature enables display of what are known as the non-printing characters. The Combining Diacritical Marks and other Unicode characters that cause display changes are defined as “printing characters” and so are not included in the list of things that become visible with Notepad++'s show all characters.

When need a true “show all characters” then I do a hex dump of the file. As you seem to have a good idea of where the strange stuff is in your file you can copy/paste just that fragment into a hex dump utility. I see there are on-line hex dumps. There are also on-line UTF-8 decoders that may highlight the unusual or invisible characters you are dealing with.

@Pioter-Jenyderka said in So I can't type letters in my notepad but I can type context menu because of reasons:

options command and compile

Compile? Notepad++ is a text editor, not a developer environment. By default, Ctrl+comma does not do anything in Notepad++. In Visual Studio Ctrl+comma brings up a code search dialog box. Maybe you have asked your question in the wrong place?

@Pioter-Jenyderka also said:

maybe something stupid that can be resolved with one click but not when you are in hurry.

Being in a hurry can be the problem.

@jaime-h said in Cursor and vertical line?:

Columns Tools plugin

Column Tools is not compatible with a stationary edge line due to the Scintilla API. There is no such thing in Scintilla as a vertical highlight, so I used the edge line to “fake one”. I thought with multi edge Scintilla API it could have been possible, but when that was released, the necessary calls were not there.

You either use “column highlight” and the edge follows the caret, or you use Notepad++ settings to get edge(s) stationary.

Cheers.

@Alan-Kilborn Thank you, thank you that worked. I’ve been looking at https://npp-user-manual.org/docs/searching/#regular-expressions and found only one mention of using “w+” , like I said all the information is confusing and probably 98% of it I’ll never need or use, but I will make note of the links. Thank you for your assistance I so appreciate it.

@mkupper said in Npp Shortcut mapper: 2 different sub-dialogs or forms:

My own focus for a project such as the one you are proposing would be to first fully understand why there is a one-to-one restriction for shortcuts to the Notepad++ actions.

My working assumption has always been that the developer added the multi-shortcut feature for Scintilla commands because it was required so that it could use DOS-style (Ctrl+INS/Shift+DEL/Shift+INS) and Windows-style (Ctrl+C/Ctrl+X/Ctrl+V) shortcuts for the same commands, but he never saw a good reason for the extra complication of having multiple shortcuts on any Notepad++-specific actions. (With the magic-copy logic now existing, those three special exceptions have been given two entries in the Main shortcut tab, rather than being part of the Scintilla tab, which I find somewhat amusing, and at least one user has complained about.)

There is an existing issue from 2018, requesting multiple shortcuts allowable for any action – but there was never any reply by the developer (yea or nay), so it sounds like it’s “uninteresting” to him, so he leaves it in the limbo state – in theory, someone interested could try to make a PR to that request, but he would be within his rights to reject it, and thus the contributor would have wasted his time; most of the regular contributors don’t bother implementing old requests like that until and unless they are certain that the developer would actually approve it.

@wonkawilly,

Evaluate this proposal to see if it is worthy to be sent to the Npp developers team on github

Regarding your “spiffy new streamlined shortcut mapper”, I have a feeling that any PR submitted for such a request would be rejected out-of-hand as being too risky – so I cannot imagine any of the regular contributors trying to impliment it, and I would be very surprised if the developer implemented it himself if a random user (or any of us regulars) suggested it, even if a hypothetical issue did get dozens of "me too"s and upvotes.

As such, and because while it’s not the best possible interface, it works sufficiently for my needs and doesn’t annoy me, so I’m not interested enough to create an issue about it.

@Nils-Petter-Olsen said in UDL languages keep disappearing:

I had clicked “save as” in the define udl window, and saved it in my own folder

You need to be more precise in your description, because that’s not what happens (under normal circumstances).

You open Language > User Defined Language > Define Your Language You create your new definition (though it’s currently under the “User Defined Language” name at this point, if you were to exit Notepad++, it would be lost; Notepad++ never stores the UDL named “User Defined Language” – it’s only there as a test bed Hit Save As. You give it a name. There is still no file defined. It’s just got an internal name. An alternate for Steps 2 and 3 would be to start by hitting Create New, which will immediately request a name; you can then define the language after that. Either way, it’s named, but no config file is written yet. Exit Notepad++: with a normal installation, it will write a file called userDefineLang.xml in your %AppData%\Notepad++ directory, assuming it has permission, with the new language(s) that you’ve defined. You should not have to move the file anywhere; it’s in the right spot to begin with.

If this isn’t the behavior you experienced, then either those weren’t the steps you followed, or you didn’t have write permission to your %AppData%\Notepad++ directory, or your Notepad++ wasn’t set up to use %AppData% – sharing your ?-menu’s Debug Info could give us insight into any non-standard config you have in that regard. If it wasn’t in the right spot in step 4 for you, you should have told us where it was, so that we could help you debug why it was in the wrong spot (but I personally doubt it was in the wrong spot, unless you have a weird configuration… or maybe if you were in Admin mode)

((Hmm, maybe if you had multiple instances of Notepad++ open, it wouldn’t save properly, if the one you saved it in wasn’t the instance that had the permissions to save configs; that might be the umpteenth reason to not use multi-instance Notepad++; I haven’t tried, and won’t bother. See the Alternate section below for a procedure that will be immune to this, even if only the primary N++ instance can write to the default UDL file, which I’m not sure if there is such a limitation or not.))

I learned that this file contained all my UDLs.

When created that way, yes.

A few years back, Notepad++ added a new %AppData%\Notepad++\userDefineLangs\ folder to hold individual UDL per file, to make it easier to make use of someone else’s UDL definition (like from the UDL Collection). But when you create a new UDL using the sequence above, it makes use of the old, combined file, rather than standalone files in the subdirectory.

So if, in your original report, by “disappear”, you meant "no file shows up in %AppData%\Notepad++\userDefineLangs\, then that’s expected behavior. But when you restart Notepad++, they should have still shown up in the Language menu, whether you created it with Save As or Create New from the UDL dialog.

Alternate

That said, I dislike Notepad++'s default behavior of keeping them all in the single userDefineLang.xml file, and much prefer using the userDefineLangs\ folder. So I use a slightly modified sequence:

Open Language > User Defined Language > Define Your Language Immediately hit Save As (or Create New) and give it a name (in this example, I will use MyName) Before inputting any keywords or stylers, I hit Export, and save to %AppData%\Notepad++\userDefineLangs\MyName.xml Confusingly, I now hit Remove to delete the current copy of MyName from the UDL dialog (if you skip this step, you will soon have two copies of the same UDL name) Exit Notepad++ and restart Language > MyName will exist (though it won’t do any highlighting yet) Go to Language > User Defined Language > Define Your Language and pick MyName from the dropdown. Edit the Stylers and Keywords, etc, to make the UDL do what I want. Notepad++ automatically saves any changes made to the UDL to the right config file when you exit Notepad++ (assuming not in multi-instance mode; I make no guarantees or warranties about behavior in that confusing mode)

… Hmm, the User Manual isn’t clear enough on that in the UDL File Locations section. I should fix that.

Update: new section “Keeping UDL Files Separate” using a variant of that sequence of steps.

@PeterJones @Coises

Okay… Settings > Preferences > General > Tab Bar > Reduce did have an unexpected impact.
The tab labels actually use a smaller font with the “Reduce” option unchecked !

Tabs 02.jpg

But it’s still composed using a Bold style. I really don’t understand why, but I’ll tell you what : I could live with that ^^.

I also experimented with %AppData%\Notepad++ and Administrator mode - which was checked, indeed, because of protected files : I use that a lot. But no dice… Recreating a new folder didn’t change anything.

Thanks a lot for trying to help ! As said above, I could honestly live with tabs in Bold, now that I can at least read longer labels ^^… It’s just a weird issue.

@notepadplupluuser said in Tabs/Spaces: Disable conversation in both directions, just keep as entered:

I need to edit a file with a crude syntax. I need to enter in some regions tabs, in others spaces.
Unfortunately I can’t edit this file, and i break it, when i do some additions in single lines.
np++ either replaces spaces by tabs (if I wish those, i would enter the tab-key), or it replaces tabs with spaces, when i enter them.

Is there somewhere a hidden configuration, where I can just say: Do what I mean. Don’t touch any of those two characters. Accept them, as I enter them?

Method 1 (no auto-indent):

At Settings | Preferences… | Language:

(Notepad++ 8.6.8): select Indent settings: Indent using: Tab character
(pre-8.6.8) uncheck Tab settings: Replace by space

At Settings | Preferences… | Auto-completion:
uncheck Auto-indent.

Method 2 (auto-indent will always use spaces):

At Settings | Preferences… | Language:

(Notepad++ 8.6.8): select Indent settings: Indent using: Space character(s)
(pre-8.6.8) check Tab settings: Replace by space

At Settings | Shortcut Mapper… | Scintilla commands:

Double-click the line for SCI_TAB. In the dropdown at the middle right (where it shows Tab), select None. Click Apply. Click OK.

@L-J ,

Sounds like your chosen spellcheck dictionary doesn’t have the vocabulary you need – that’s not surprising if your “large words” are in a specialty jargon (medical, engineering, etc). You may need to add words to the custom dictionary.

Assuming you’ve chosen the Hunspell dictionary option in DSpellCheck, and assuming you’ve added at least one word to your custom dictionary: you can go to the DSpellCheck settings, grab the directory name from the Hunspell Dictionaries Path field, and then in that directory, open en_US.usr (or en_GB.usr, or en_AU.usr, or whichever flavor of English you’ve chosen for DSpellCheck). Then you can add all the technical/jargon/“large words” that are missing in that location. After you’ve saved the .usr file, restart Notepad++, and DSpellCheck will recognize all those words.

@Ashish-D
Same problem here, but it disappeared when I went to Plugins / XML Tools and turned off “Enable XML syntax auto-check”.

@Alan-Kilborn Thank you so much, that worked beatifully

Update: I uninstalled (including settings) and reinstalled Notepad++, and it fixed the issue—at least for now. Thank you everyone for your help!

@andy-souter Yes, found out how to make it work. Excludes the strings i want excluded, but getting new ones not excluded that I did not expect. But I now have a way forward. Thanks for your help.

@Alan-Kilborn said in [Feature Request] Close file without confirmation on Ctrl+Click on close button:

Put your feature request in. :-)

https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issues/15250

@guy038
… you guys are really incredible … for me this is another dimension !!! … wow … it worked great !!! … and I hope that your solutions will help many many others … I’m pretty sure about that, as I spent hours !!! trying to find a solution before, as this is not possible with Google Earth and there is no third party software solution yet …
Thank you so much … ;-)

@kracovwolf
\s+ matches any number of whitespace characters.

I’m not going to give you any more hints on basic regex usage - I will once again recommend that you read the user manual’s topic on regular expressions.

While learning regular expressions may be slow going (it took me a long time to get where I am now), believe me when I say that (1) it is worth the effort, and (2) you can’t get there by asking others for the answer.

@pianoprofitonal ,

Create a User Defined Language (UDL) using Language > User Defined Language > Define Your Language, giving the language a name. On the Operators & Delimiters page, put the special characters (space-separated) into the Operators1 box, and use the Operators Styler button to assign the color for the special characters. On the Comment & Number page, use the Number Style’s Styler button to set the color for numbers. And on the Folder & Default page, Default Style, use the Styler button to set the “default” color, which will be the color of all the alphabetic (and unspecified) characters.

Selecting that UDL from the Language menu (or defining the extension in the UDL, and opening a file with that special extension) will activate that special colorization.

@ITManders said in Not using %appdata% when installing via CLI:

Is it possible to silent install while also not using %appdata%?

Sorry, as far as I’ve ever seen, that is not currently one of the installer options. One would have to request that feature by following the instructions in our feature request FAQ