And further to @Alan-Kilborn’s query: you do understand that, while Notepad++ does it’s best to keep unsaved changes in the temporary session-snapshot-and-periodic-backup folder, it does not guarantee that the OS won’t crash, causing the loss of some or all of those files. If you have 1-2 files worth of data loss from that, that’s horrible (as many, many posts have proven, over the years). But you have what is likely a hundred or more unsaved files in that screenshot. Which means if your OS gets in a bad mood, or if something interferes with a Notepad++ update process, you would lose huge amounts of data. Please, for the sake of all that information that I am sure you actually care about, please look into a way to save files to meaningful locations and institute appropriate backups for mission-critical data. Because I’d hate for you to be the next unfortunate soul to lose all their unsaved changes, and the best we would be able to tell you is “maybe try Recuva”. That stinks, for everyone involved (but mostly for you). We have a Backup FAQ to help you make informed decisions about your own saving and backup schemes. And I encourage people to use external backup software, and/or version control software, as appropriate. Please, PLEASE, don’t just continue working with a hundred or more unsaved files, hoping that nothing will ever go wrong.

@MayTheCatgirl said: I tried using the following expression with “. matches newline” enabled and it finds the code block: [beginning of code].+?[end of code] However Notepad++'s find and replace does not support multiline find and replace I’m wondering what you mean by “does not support multiline find and replace.” I think you must mean that you can’t easily enter a replace expression that contains multiple lines. and when I use it this way to paste the 100-line block of code where I want it, it messes up the formatting and cuts off the last few lines. There are a couple possible problems. I believe there is a character limit (I don’t recall what it is) to how much you can put in the Replace box. But also… are you considering that you can’t just blindly copy a block of code into that box, because some characters have special meanings? In particular, backslashes, parentheses, and depending on the context, dollar signs, question marks and colons, have special meanings and must be escaped. I assume you are substituting the original content, so you’re using something like: Find: OLDPREFIX(.*?)OLDSUFFIX Replace: NEWPREFIX$1NEWSUFFIX to do it? Or is the replacement content exactly the same every time, using no part of the original content? I’d love to just use the default Notepad++ one for this as its “find in files” feature is a lot more helpful than requiring me to open all 300 files I want to search through but it seems that is not an option. It can probably be done. It might have to be done in a couple steps instead of just one, if the replacement expression has too many characters to put in the box all at once.

@LiivaneLord said: I have noticed that I can now take tab and drag it outside window to make new instance of notepad++. Thank you. That’s not a new feature in v8.9.7. It’s been there a long time (as long as I can remember *). There is only 2 bugs - I cant drag modified file and I cant drag new file from scratch. That’s inherent to the design (and nothing new, so not a regression, and thus shouldn’t be in the Release Announcement anyway) To drag a file to a new instance, there needs to be an underlying file on the filesystem, with all the bytes that you want to open in the new instance, because what Notepad++ does is it launches a new instance of the executable, then uses the internal “file > open” command to read the original file off the disk, then closes the old copy from the old instance of Notepad++. If there wasn’t a file on the disk, there would be nothing for the new instance to read; and if there are unsaved changes, then those changes would not be saved to the disk yet, so the new instance couldn’t read those. To protect you from losing all the unsaved text that you’ve already typed, Notepad++ doesn’t activate the “move to new instance” feature when you try to do it with unsaved changes (whether in a new # document, or in an existing file with unsaved edits). The behavior you described is thus “working as designed” to keep you from unexpectedly losing your data, and thus not a bug (and definitely not a regression). *: update: yes, I tried back to v8.0 in 2021 and even v7.0 from 2016, and I could drag a tab from the tabbar to a new instance, even from the 2016 version of the application. Having proven it worked that way a decade ago, I can confidently say that this is definitely not a new feature. since this is not a new feature, and the problems you are describing are neither a problem with a new feature nor a regression in an existing feature, and they don’t belong in the “Notepad++ release 8.9.7” announcement, this question and reply have been forked to a separate “help wanted” topic.

@dcog989 Thanks for this - if you have any tweaks or updates you’ve made since this comment, let me know!

@SMD40470 , I think the most likely reason (whether or not you think it’s “serious” enough) is that no one has asked for that feature, and the developer didn’t think of it himself yet. If it was just a UDL issue, I would probably say, “You should put in the feature request, but unfortunately, there have been no new features in UDL for over a decade, with a lot of really good feature requests that would be more fundamental to making UDL work better, so it’s doubtful it would be implemented any time soon.” However, based on this Issue about NFO files and OEM-US/CP437 encoding, it looks like there might be other people interested, even in non-UDL circumstances. So I wonder if the better feature request might be the more generic request, something like [FEATURE REQUEST] Allow setting preferred encoding on a per-language basis. However, there does currently exist a workaround: the AutoCodepage plugin can be used to set default encoding on a per-extension basis. While it might be nice to have it built in, the plugin currently provides the feature. Steps to get it to work: Have a UDL. In my example, I call it MyUDL and I give it the Ext.: smd, so all files ending in .smd will be treated as that UDL. (I picked smd from the letters in your username) Install the plugin Plugins > AutoCodepage > Settings Set Group Name = MyUDL Set Code page to start = OEM 437: US Leave Expected language blank (because that dropdown doesn’t include UDL in the list) Click the + button under the left panel make sure MyUDL is highlighted in the upper left panel of the dialog Set New filename extension(s) = SMD whether you type in lowercase or uppercase, it ends up uppercase the plugin automatically adds the . prefix when you + the extension you could type another extension and + add it if your UDL has multiple possible extensions Click the + button under the right panel The dialog should look like: [image: 1787174274647-5713f8fa-39a7-4597-b1bf-dc5da4e15e3b-image.jpeg] Close the dialog side notes: It took me a few times to figure out the right sequence, because the plugin’s documentation is a bit sparse, which is why I was explicit as to the right order. If you want to add another group – like an MS-DOS NFO group with the same codepage, but defaulting to the NFO language – you would have to follow similar steps of typing the name, setting the encoding and language, then doing the + – even though it looks like you are editing the MyUDL, as soon as you click + instead of Modify, it will create the new entry instead of modifying the old entry; you then make sure the new entry is selected, and add NFO to its extension list. Create a new file, and immediate right-click the tab and name it blah.smd Notepad++ will automatically apply the UDL, since the UDL extension is set to smd AutoCodepage will automatically apply the OEM-US encoding Open an existing blah.smd file Notepad++ will automatically apply the UDL, since the UDL extension is set to smd AutoCodepage will automatically apply the OEM-US encoding The nice thing about this plugin is that it applies that encoding when you first name, or save-and-name a file, and when you open the file from disk. I believe this should meet your needs, even if no one ever requests or implements the feature in native Notepad++.

@saintleningrad-prog , I had not really thought about embedding encrypted text inside another otherwise unencrypted file. Do you have a specific use case, or example use-cases, in mind? In my opinion, all-or-nothing with encryption generally seems sufficient.

Hi @franz-joli , I haven’t come across such behavior myself and cancelling compare on my side has always been working flawlessly. As @peterjones had already kindly suggested, If you continue to experience such problem you could open an issue here and describe it step-by-step starting with your Notepad++ setup and plugin version (by providing the Notepad++ Debug Info... from its ? menu) and it would be great also if you could provide example files to try on my side. We can discuss the problem further there. Thank you Peter, precise and helpful as always! :)