@M-Andre-Z-Eckenrode said: This command requires a rectangular selection. Extend selection to the last line of the document? And, Columns++ Search neophyte that I am, I didn’t heed the suggestion. Had you heeded it, you would still have gotten a rectangular selection, as it says, extending downward from your selection — not necessarily enclosing the whole document, and in any case not the same as selecting the whole document (or selecting nothing at all) first. I should re-word that message, I’m just not sure what to say instead. It’s not actually true (since version 0.8) that a rectangular selection is required; as I mentioned before, the rules are complicated. They won’t easily fit into a message box. It makes sense when you’re using Columns++ for working with columns, but the search kind of took on a life of its own, apart from column work… hence, among other reasons, Search++. I’ve redone the experiment with all the my example text selected, and all instances of ' were successfully replaced with ’, without any anomalies. Thank you for that information. I do appreciate the help you’ve given me with this. While it doesn’t prove anything (almost nothing is ever proven when dealing with an intermittent bug), it suggests pretty strongly that something I changed in moving the Columns++ search process to Search++ has introduced a hidden instability. I’m still looking for it.

@PeterJones said: You also mentioned “uninstalling the plugins and reinstalling them” – that sounds like you have both plugins installed at the same time. I highly doubt that it’s a good idea to have both Compare and ComparePlus installed on the same instance. Sorry, I only have Compare Plus installed now - so I tried uninstalling and re-installing it to see if it was fixed. Both are not installed. As far as I can tell, neither Compare nor ComparePlus has a “cancel” action. They have a “Clear Active Compare” action. Are you saying that you hit that “Clear Active Compare” button while it’s still working on making the comparison, to stop it in the middle? Or do you just mean that you are clearing the comparison once it’s done? I am hitting this cancel button to stop it in the middle of working; [image: 1786224004669-97162e74-5601-4918-b18e-1dfa20830fa5-image.jpeg] But with normal usage (telling it to compare, looking at the results, clearing the active compare), I have never gotten to the point that the plugin just hangs indefinitely. If you have a pair of files (with no private information) that you can get to cause the hang reliably, and can explain, in detail, the procedure that you use to cause the freeze, then I would recommend that you create an issue at the plugin’s GitHub repo so that you can let @pnedev know about the problem. I will do this - although I suspect it will not reproduce since these same files worked at first for me too. Thank you…

@PeterJones Okay, yes, there are several subdir in that folder that are links (issue #18248). Actually, the first subdir is a plain one and is displayed whereas the second one is a link and is not displayed while preventing the display of the remaining data. I’ll give the RC a try. Thanks again.

@mpheath , I am curious: do you think it’s enough to warrant trying to get v1 in Plugins Admin for the upcoming v8.9.8 RC? Or should I give more time for more people to test? (Or do you think it’s really worth publishing at all?) (And secondary question: for getting the styler output from SciTE, are you just running TestLexers.exe from a N++ or just-scintilla build? or is there another way of generating that? I have my PythonScript styleDebugger script for doing it inside N++, but was curious if there was an easy way to do it directly from SciTE)