In case anyone is interested, I’ve created a version of this that runs as a Windows application rather than as a Notepad++ plugin, so it works in all applications:

Compose for Windows

This should be considered experimental. Since it works everywhere, not just in Notepad++, it has more potential to mess things up if I’ve missed something.

Since it has no connection to Notepad++ (other than being a spin-off of the plugin described in the original topic message):

The convenience features for editing a user definitions file which I added in response to @PeterJones’ notes aren’t included.

Further discussion will be off-topic here. Please raise questions and concerns in the Issues for the project.

The actions to create GitHub pages are, for some reason and at least temporarily, not working on this repository, which affects the normal presentation of the help file. However, you can still read the help file here (though some links appear to be garbled).

@NolanNolan said in Standard ANSI and code still change to something else:

But really weird that using Microsofts own notepad.exe that comes with a standard windows installation makes windows search not detect characters in txt files that belongs to the installation language of the OS.

Perhaps not quite as strange as it might first appear.

Support for Unicode in Windows dates back to the first release of Windows NT in 1993. (NT was a “business” operating system; it took another eight years or so to get Unicode into “consumer” systems.) The thing is, Windows chose to support 16-bit characters: UCS-2, which later became UTF-16. UTF-8 wasn’t even presented publicly until 1993, and it took many more years for it to become popular. Most early adopters of Unicode, like Windows, used 16-bit “wide” characters.

So, for a long time, in Windows “Unicode” meant UTF-16. Windows XP (2001) introduced code page 65001 for UTF-8, but it was only useful in conversion functions and console sessions. In Windows 10 Version 1903 (May 2019), it became possible to set UTF-8 (65001) as the system code page; however, that doesn’t (yet, in 2025 at least) do as much as you might hope it would, and it can precipitate odd behavior in software. (I tested your specific case: setting Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support does not change how search in Windows Explorer interprets files without a byte order mark.)

Files using legacy (“ANSI”) encodings are too common to ignore, but, as @PeterJones pointed out in his earlier post in this thread, there is no completely reliable way to distinguish an “ANSI” encoding from UTF-8. Windows chose to use the byte order mark (already in use in UTF-16 files) to signal when a file is UTF-8. Windows simply does not recognize a file without a byte order mark as Unicode.

Notepad++ uses byte order marks, too, but it also recognizes when a file has a very high likelihood of being UTF-8 (without a byte order mark). This is possible because the details of UTF-8 encoding make it highly unlikely that a legacy text file will “accidentally” also be a valid UTF-8 file — unless it is very short, has been intentionally crafted to trigger false detection, or contains only ASCII characters. (Since ASCII characters are represented identically in UTF-8 and in legacy code pages, the last case only matters if you edit a file which contained only ASCII characters so that it contains one or more non-ASCII characters. In that case, it is important to set your intended encoding depending on how the file will be used.)

What you’re confronting is the difference between how Windows detects UTF-8 (must have a byte order mark) and how Notepad++ detects UTF-8 (valid UTF-8 byte sequence, which is statistically highly unlikely to be a legacy encoding).

There is no good solution to this without inventing a time machine and changing decisions that were made over three decades ago.

Well… no good solution that does not sacrifice reasonable backward compatibility. I consider that one of Windows’ best features, and I admire Microsoft for sticking to it. Twenty-year old programs can still run on current versions of Windows. I hate the culture of “If it’s not constantly maintained and upgraded, junk it!” that’s overtaken most of the computing world. A job once done well should stay done. (I suspect this has a lot to do with Microsoft’s dominance in business applications.) Not everyone shares my view.

@PeterJones

i have to hand it to you this worked, thank you :-)

I couldnt find this description elsewhere, i tested all the 3 thirdparty apps, wthy didnt work though

I seems to have missed the reg addition of defaulticon should be in the string sith notepad++

best Nolan

@mpheath

I had to save the UDL with and it worked very well, thank you very much!

When the Fill Find Field with Selected Text option, in settings, is unchecked, and the user invokes Select And Find …, perhaps the program should (simply) run the code for the “volatile” version of the command.

(I should have said this in my previous post.)

@mpheath ,

Thanks again for you reply! I plan to test your BufferRestore script after my next “break” in my current project(s). After looking closer at your post and web page, this looks to be a good option for me to use until NP++ has a built in tool…

I do own a rack of servers and plan to spin up a couple extra VMs once I release my own platform/environment for my apps (within the next couple months). The challenge with one of the (main) current platforms which I’m using is, while I pay annually to be a developer for them, their licensing does not allow me to run on more than 1 PC at a time, so it requires me to log out/in each time I switch between PCs or VMs. I can’t maintain the variable “state” if forced to log out.

There are many additional issues with Windows Rebooting… When the current test environments get “killed”, all the opened files are now locked and all the variables are flushed. So it requires unlocking the files, and recreating the previous workflow to recreate the variable “state”. Using a log file doesn’t work well in this environment, because it typically goes back beyond the last save… and could only be applied if the saved file was in the exact state as when the log file was started… not sure if that makes sense?

@pbarney said in PHP Linter PythonScript:

my impression is that Pythonscript ships with 2.8

From Plugins Admin, PythonScript v2.1.0 uses Python v2.7.18 (as far as I am aware, there is no such thing as Python v2.8).

However, if you go to the PythonScript releases page, you will see that there is also an “alpha” track of PythonScript v3.0.x (currently at 3.0.24), which use Python v3.12.xx. This is the route I personally recommend (caveat below).

The maintainer of PythonScript has chosen not to take PythonScript 3 out of “alpha” until it fully supports non-unicode encodings (ie, until it supports the 1980s-style character set encodings), so until that point, to get a maintained version of the Python interpreter for PythonScript, you have to manually install an alpha version of PythonScript – essentially, you have to put up with legacy syntax of Python if you want to deal with legacy non-unicode encodings of text. I personally have no need of supporting 80s technology for file encodings (and I pity anyone for whom their circumstances demand that they deal with file encodings that haven’t been brought into this millennium anytime in the last quarter century), so I use the 2020s version of Python for my PythonScript. (My personal opinion is that PythonScript should start shipping PythonScript 3 as non-alpha, and that they just prominently make it clear that if you have to deal with the old character sets that you should instead install the outdated PythonScript2 version from the releases page. But my opinion on such things holds no weight.)

@guy038 said in How to Print Pretty with missing close tags.:

Let’s start from your solution

I’d hardly call it “my” solution. In that I used your generic find/replace-in-region formula, and plugged in reasonable values for the “variables” from that generic formula. The whole point of that generic formula is to make it really easy for anyone to just plug in their BSR/ESR/FR into the formula, and have it “just work”, without having to optimize or tweak.

If I run, successively,

As @Doctor-Rashir said here, “There are many closed tags”… In other words, it’s not just SONRQ and SIGNOMSGSRQV1, and trying to manually run a separate regular expression for each of the “many closed tags” is thus not practical. That is why I went to a script to automate it.

@donho
Good attempt, just for surety, why not ;-)

And I’ve to admit that I used to “abuse” churches too - in the summer it was nice and cool there and, most importantly, quiet, so I could study there and prepare for my exams :-)

@Terry-R @Lycan-Thrope

Otherwise on topic - there are IMO no complete atheists (in the sense of believing in something that is beyond my reach or ordinary understanding), everyone has their own faith. But while someone believes e.g. that gravity will still work tomorrow when they wake up, someone else believes in the virgin conception of the Virgin Mary, when the Holy Spirit entered her. For me, religion just parasites on and shackles the natural human need to believe in something better/bigger, something that gives human existence true meaning and a greater dimension.

@guy038

More good information. Thank you!

Barry

Thank you guys all so very much, now that I know that it’s a GVAS file, I’ll chase down that lead and try to get somewhere!!!

@h-jangra

I doubt that you can implement this in Scintilla in a reasonable way, but the other idea of having a preview is there, and there are at least two plugins, here and here that can give you some ideas.

@PeterJones I think I found the culprit behind this.

Looks like I had my Avast autoupdater to ON, and probably it was the reason behind quiet updates for both Notepad++ and my Mozilla Thunderbird 42.

It became a routine for me to reinstall old versions over and over and over agian.

Thank you for your response.

Really appreciate your help and detailed approach.

@PeterJones
Thank you for the reply. Yes, I understood that inference. I was hoping there was additional tweaks to try. Yes, I could do a reply. It was triggered on a very minor edit. Maybe the site support would be interested in the issue. But it’s not important to me now.

@Rick-Kosters

You can try the free Agent Ransack utility from https://www.mythicsoft.com
It works with .doc, .docx and .pdf files too.

after a look at jn-npp-plugin on github it seems Win32 API is not available in win x64 and i didn’t find other way to use openfiledialog…
i am looking at python plugin now .

thanks for your help

@rdipardo

I didn’t mean that I run and hide from anything that AI is touched or influenced by. That wouldn’t be practical.

@Wes-Owens

Here is the procedure, which is 100% reliable for me:

Ctrl+F, enter search terms, FIND ALL IN CURRENT DOCUMENT Find Dialog closes. Search Results dialog is shown Hitting F7 will toggle between the Search Results and Editor having focus If Search Results has focus, it will have blue title bar If editor has focus, you will be able to type in editor If Search Results has focus, hitting ESC will close it

See this animated screen grab:

3ca2bc47-53e2-4871-b24b-80793ab27d1a-SearchResultsF7-ESC.gif

edit: even if I have the setting that @Terry-R mentioned checkmarked: I see the Search Dialog after hitting the FIND ALL IN CURRENT DOCUMENT button, I still see that the Search Results window is given focus when I do (see the blue title bar for that panel):

f034944b-732d-455c-a662-8c445c4d0573-image.png

And when the Search Results have focus, the SINGLE KEY ESC is sufficient to close the panel.

@Juan-Delgado said in Windows ARM64 25H2 Notepad++ 8.8.7 doesn't start:

So, I uninstalled the Notepad

I think it helped due to completely deleting the N++ settings, namely the config.xml file. There is a N++ Smart Highlighting bug (already fixed for the next N++ version), more here: https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issues/17126#issuecomment-3476961976