Wow. Great post @PeterJones.
You may not know this, but editing the windows registry is one of my strongest areas on computers. So it was a breeze for me to recreate what you have said here.
This method is superior to creating a asNotepad.xml file in the Notepad++ directory because that does not open the file that you want to open in the viewing tab but only loads it into the tab bar so you are left staring at an older file that you opened which is definitely not what the user wants.
Also, this option still allows you to open things in the regular, sessioned and tabbed notepad++ while giving you another option in the right click menu to open things in a single tabbed format just like notepad.exe
So, if you also want notepad++ to work like this, I created a .reg file, just create a file that ends with the .reg extension and copy paste the following in to it.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\SingleTabNotepad++]
@ = "Edit with Notepad++ (Single Tab)"
"Icon"=hex(2):63,00,3a,00,5c,00,70,00,72,00,6f,00,67,00,72,00,61,00,6d,00,20,\
00,66,00,69,00,6c,00,65,00,73,00,20,00,28,00,78,00,38,00,36,00,29,00,5c,00,\
4e,00,6f,00,74,00,65,00,70,00,61,00,64,00,2b,00,2b,00,5c,00,6e,00,6f,00,74,\
00,65,00,70,00,61,00,64,00,2b,00,2b,00,2e,00,65,00,78,00,65,00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\SingleTabNotepad++\command]
@ = "\"c:\\program files (x86)\\Notepad++\\notepad++.exe\" -nosession -notabbar -multiInst \"%1\""
This will give you an option on top of the default “Edit with Notepad++” to use notepad++ without the sessions or tabs and will open the files separately just like in notepad.exe (without changing any default notepad++ behaviour)
Thanks to everyone who replied!