Hello, @mark-boonie and All,

I said in this post that we can translate the regex’s logic to :

What_I_do_not_want(*SKIP)(*F)|What_I_want. See also the excellent article, on this topic, at https://www.rexegg.com/backtracking-control-verbs.php#skipfail !

But, regarding your present example, @mark-boonie, I suppose that we should invert the logic and tell :

What_I_want_to_keep(*SKIP)(*F)|What_I_want_to_delete

This means that any multi-lines block, with delimiters Block start and Block end containing the string 80     00010000 is not considered ( text is skipped ) and that any single line contents, with its line-break, due to the (?-s) modifier, must be deleted

Note that the use of the Backtracking Control Verbs (*SKIP) and (*F) is not mandatory at all ! we could have used this syntax, instead, for similar results :

SEARCH (?s)^\*Block start\h*((?!\*Block start).)+?80 00010000.+?^\*Block end\h*\R?|(?-s)^.*\R?

REPLACE (?1$0)

We simply change the non-capturing group (?:(?!\*Block start).)+? into a capturing group ((?!\*Block start).)+?

We tell that, in replacement, we must rewrite any block entirely ( $0 ), if the group 1 exists, thus the (?1$0) syntax

And, as there is no colon char and text after (?1$0, nothing must be taken in account if the group 1 is absent, which is the case in the (?-s)^.*\R? part !

Best regards,

guy038

@fml2 said in Feature Request / Question: Soft Wrap at Vertical Edge (Column 80) regardless of window size:

@Coises Thank you for the quick implementation! If enebaled, it applies to all documets, not just the current one, right?

Yes, I made it a single toggle for all documents in both views.

It would be possible, but considerably more complex, to track documents and enable/disable per document. (I do it with elastic tabstops in Columns++.)

@donho ,
Thanks for the verifcation, and sorry for the late reponse, I came down really sick that night for about a 5 day period after posting this, and am just getting back into the swing of things. Just wanted to make sure we didn’t need to be redundant about that process. Thanks again for the clarification.

@PeterJones I managed to do it, I uninstalled it again and when it asked about settings, I answered no, upon startup it was like a completely new installation.Screenshot_1.png nnn.png
When I started up, I changed the theme and it worked, thank you very much for the tips.

@PeterJones said in "In Find, Regex Search in Current File Limited to "Find Next" Downward Direction Only":

Perfect, thank you for the explanation about how the config file is managed.

One point: I was the one who hallucinated, trying to find a reason for this limitation in regex usage.

Thanks for the clarification!

Much appreciated!

@Alan-Kilborn
Current line background colour is now white, also tried minty green
Selected text is now the minty green
Multi-selected text color is also minty green

minty green for all 3 then Current line background colour white.

green-white.jpg

@Mister-Smitt said in Why is the forum so scary?:

I chose the dark style. I create a new theme and some simply incredibly disgusting additional black and white window appears in the form of some kind of cutout from the main one, which does not even move.
Who is your stylist?

The forum’s themes and skins come from the authors of NodeBB. If you don’t like the free themes that they make available to this Notepad++ community for free, that’s really your problem. You don’t need to be a jerk about it.

@Mister-Smitt said in Where does this nasty line highlighting come from??:

2026_02_12_22_0838.png

How to fix this?

Read this FAQ

And I would like you to spit in the face of the person who did this when you are next to him.

Okay, I just spit in my own face. Does that make you feel better?

(New features sometimes have bugs. The new feature of updating your horribly-outdated theme to give you access to all the modern styles that have been hidden from you for years was a great idea, but the original implementation, under certain circumstances, had unintended side effects. And the relatively few people who updated to v8.8.9 or 8.9.0 have to go through a bit of extra effort; those who skipped those two versions will not have the side effects. But if spitting in my face helps you, go ahead.)

@guy038 said in Columns++ version 1.3: All Unicode, all the time:

So, if I understand correctly, the Boost regex engine hasn’t updated Unicode since version 5.2 ? Very surprising !

That part, at least, is easy to answer.

For the most part, Boost::regex doesn’t directly implement Unicode properties. It relies on either the operating system’s character classification routines or ICU.

It’s also possible to define a custom character traits class in C++ for use by Boost::regex.

Notepad++ and (I think) MultiReplace let Boost::regex fall back to Windows’ character classification. So that will update when and only when Windows updates.

Windows only handles “ANSI” and UTF-16. To work with the full range of Unicode code points, Boost::regex requires either ICU or a custom character traits class.

I wanted to use ICU in Columns++, but after searching and asking in a couple forums, I could not find a way to incorporate ICU in a plugin. Everything I could find talked about installing ICU on the operating system. I finally gave up, never having determined if it is even possible to deploy ICU at the application/plugin level as opposed to installing it as an operating system component.

Instead, Columns++ uses the custom character traits class approach to provide character traits for 32-bit Unicode characters — which means I had to invent my own process for analyzing the Unicode character files, compiling them into something reasonably compact and fast, and translating that into character properties. So that’s why it was possible for me to update to Unicode 17.0. That wouldn’t apply to Notepad++/MultiReplace or Boost::regex itself, because they don’t directly include anything to do with Unicode character properties; they’re dependent on Windows.

@FreeMeow Thank you!

@PeterJones , Perfect, many thanks,

@PeterJones
Thanks for the clear explanation, That really cleared up my confusion. I appreciate you taking the time to break it down and explain what actually happened and why updating is safe now.

@Michael-König said in Option "In selection" not available to replace a text block:

for this I mark the text block using the keys [Alt]+[UpperCase] and the mouse
then I open the dialog box “Replace” using [Strg]+[H] and enter the text to be changed in the find field and the new text in the replace field
I find the option “In selection” but this option is not selectable
what have I to do in order to succeed?

The find and replace functions built in to Notepad++ do not work with rectangular (column) selections or multiple selections.

The Columns++ plugin (which I wrote) can do that.

Take a look at the help for the search function and see if you think it would work for you. You can install the current version of Columns++ from Plugins | Plugins Admin… by checking the box beside Columns++ and clicking the Install button at the top right. Be sure to save your work first since Notepad++ closes and restarts to install plugins.

@pasha-19 said in styler.xml/WordsStyle/keywordClass association with langs.xml/Language/Keyword/Name:

I was looking to add a WordsStyle with a keyword list to an existing language.

That’s not the way it works. Existing languages are hardcoded (compiled) internally with a list of available styleIDs, and only particular styleIDs have keyword lists associated with them. You cannot just add a WordsStyle with its own styleID and a list of keywords, and hope that the lexer will magically see them. It will not.

My question concerns the styler.xml/WordsStyle/keywordClass that appears to match langs.xml/Language/Keyword/Name. There are some seemingly standard keywordClass values instre1, instre2 and type1 to type7 and maybe type8. Do these seemingly standard values have any additional meaning besides providing a link from the keywordClass in styler.xml to the Language/Keyword/Name in langs.xml?

They have an integer value (0-8). Those correspond to the 9 available keyword lists inside the lexer, which any given lexer may reference zero or more of.

If you use the wrong keywordClass, Notepad++ will not be able to pass the list of words to the lexer. And if you make up a keywordClass or use one that’s not already defined for a given language, the lexer won’t see it, and those keywords won’t get highlighted.

[can] any keywordClass/Name that matches could be used?

Nope, sorry. Each lexer has a predefined list that Notepad++ will pass on to the lexer and that the lexer will recognize.

To sum up: the official list of available keywordClass/name values for any given lexer are listed in the copy of langs.model.xml that ships with a given version of Notepad++: that will always list all the ones that Notepad++ knows about, and if you try to define others than those for any given language, Notepad++ cannot pass it on to the lexer.

However, it may be that your langs.xml or stylers.xml are out of date. If you haven’t updated to v8.9.1 yet, run that update, and the first time you run, Notepad++ will update langs.xml and stylers.xml (or any other active theme) to include any missing styles. You might find that the language you want to customize has more keyword lists available in the Style Configurator now.

If a given language doesn’t have enough different styles to give you differently-colored sets of keywords, you cannot just trick Notepad++ into creating more for you. However, using the EnhanceAnyLexer plugin (you can install it using Plugins Admin from the Plugins menu), you could define a regular expression to match the keywords you wanted. For example, for a given lexer language, if you wanted to add three keywords with red foreground and four with a blue foreground, you could use the following in the EnhanceAnyLexer configuration file (whcih you can easily access using Plugins > EnhanceAnyLexer > Enhance current language.

[LexerName] 0x0000FF = \b(red1|red2|red3)\b 0xFF0000 = \b(blueA|blueB|blueC|BlueD)\b

This will give:
ad688e24-5716-46a9-beae-934a6017df82-image.png

The EnhanceAnyLexerConfig.ini has documentation in its comments, explaining that it’s 0xBBGGRR for the hex colors, and how to get those colors to only apply within certain parent styles, etc. And https://github.com/Ekopalypse/EnhanceAnyLexer/ is the homepage for the plugin.

@PeterJones
Fixed.
Thank you for reminding me!

@PeterJones ,
I just use the Context menu to create an entry that I can right click on the page and switch to the language I want using the contextMenu.xml file with the following entries.

<Item id="0"/> <Item MenuEntryName="Language" subMenuId="language-userDefinedLanguage" name="User Defined Language" MenuItemName="dBASEPlus_Dark"/> <Item MenuEntryName="Language" subMenuId="language-userDefinedLanguage" name="User Defined Language" MenuItemName="dBASEPlus_Light"/>

This seems to me to be the quickest easiest way to do this kind of thing and it’s always available with a right mouse click and selection.

Moderator note: with the recent post in this Topic, my attention was drawn here. And I saw that at least one of the most recent links was a malicious download site, so I removed that link. But that has made me revisit all the links in this Topic. Any that are direct links to an actual alternative editor’s official site, or a github page, are left. Ones that are ad-ridden “blogs” with dubious reviews of editors are being removed, because they are all years out-of-date and/or possibly malicious downloads: honestly, if you can type the words “alternative for Notepad++ on Mac”, you can do your own modern websearch and find dozens of those “alternative to” websites which claim to review applictions, and we don’t need this forum to be a link to outdated ad/“review” sites; such links are not helpful to anyone here.

@Xan-Kun ,

Yes, Notepad++ drastically improved the behavior when trying to save admin-only files in v8.8.6 in October.

Specifically, in older versions (v8.8.5 and earlier), when it would make you restart Notepad++, there are two conditions:

If you had left the option to save the session snapshot with periodic “backup” enabled, then your changes would be preserved in the periodic “backup”, and when it restarted as Admin (after Windows OS does a UAC prompt, unless you have UAC prompting off), then it would be able to save them. And then you’d accidentally leave it running as Admin, and could accidentally ovewrite any file you wanted, and might mess up your settings. So, a great situation to be in. But if you had disabled the periodic backup, like many do (see our backup FAQ for reasons why), then when Notepad++ asked if you wanted to restart, you would have to Ctrl+A Ctrl+C to copy all the changes before asking the question it’s currently prompting you for, then then restart Notepad++ (*: and not prompt you about unsaved changes; so if you didn’t do the copy-all already, you just lost minutes or hours of changes; wheee!!!), then see that the file is back to the original (because it couldn’t be saved), and then have to paste in your changes (hoping you hadn’t accidentally hit Ctrl+C on anything in the meantime, losing your file changes), and then do the save. And then you would need to remember to exit Notepad++ and manually restart it (because Notepad++ doesn’t have a “restart in normal mode” button or menu entry when you’re running as Admin) to go back to normal editing.

And, in v8.8.6 and newer: You would edit a file. When you go to hit save, Notepad++ asks Windows OS for permission to write to the protected file. If you have UAC enabled, then Windows OS will do the UAC prompt to let you know it’s writing to a protected file, and then do it; if you have UAC disabled, then Windows checks if your user is allowed to elevate without asking, and if it does, it automatically elevates and allows Notepad++ to save. But either way, after that save, Notepad++ is back to the normal permissions, and there is no chance you will forget to switch out of Admin mode and/or get your config files messed up. So much better situation.

Re-enabling the Windows OS UAC prompts (that you disabled at some point) would get you the level of “don’t accidentally save this Admin file” protection you want, without ruining the improvement for everyone who runs without periodic backup or doesn’t want to risk corrupting their config files and doesn’t want to ruin dragging a file from Windows Explorer into Notepad++ because Notepad++ was accidentally left in Admin mode. (It’s also best practice for Windows security. If you are running with your main user who can be elevated without Windows doing a UAC prompt, then as soon as any malware gets on your system, even if it’s only running as your “normal” user, it can access every file on your drive by just telling Windows “but I’m user Xan-Kun, so of course I’ll play nice”. So you are opening yourself to a huge security risk by running without Windows UAC prompts.)

The change was intentional. The change makes the software better. As a fellow user of Notepad++, I don’t see a good reason to go back to pre-8.8.6 behavior.