@PeterJones said: Okay, when I try that in the VM firefox, then it does switch to light mode, and the value in Local Storage changes from darkTheme=screen to darkTheme=none. Thank you for testing and confirmation. It’s good to hear, that it is not a specific misbehaviour on my side which I am unable to solve, but more a general issue. Nevertheless, since I learned to live with it, it doesn’t bother me too much. If it ever gets fixed some day, I’ll get used to it too. ;-)

Hi, @coises, First of all, sorry for the typo. I did mean : As an example, I chose to show all lines containing the the property string, with this exact case, in the ICU.txt file ! You’re perfectly right about the bug. It occurs only when the Always hide all lines and remove Show style from text before Show command option, in the Settings dialog is unchecked After checking this option in the Setting dialog, I could easily verify, with the ICU.txt file, that the 13 green markers were there, along with the 13 lines containing the the property string I also noted that, right after you just show these 13 lines, clicking in the margin right below the line 1183 just displays the remaining lines of the ICU.txt file ! I think that behavior is normal because if you then click on the marker of the 1183 line, it then also displays all lines between lines 1164 and 1183. Moreover, if after showing these 13 lines, in the ICU.txt file, you switch to an other tab, then switch back to the ICU.txt file, this time, it also displays a triangular green marker in the last line 2132 of the file ! Finally, as you said, I could verify that the markers : Were not restored at all after a click on the Reset button which follows a click on the Expand button Were not completly restored after a click on the Reset button which follows a click on the Expand before or Expand after button Were correctly preserved if you immediately click on the Reset button However, the Show only lines with shown text in the Tools dialog seem to work properly, even after switching tabs : lines to show and markers seem preserved ! Best Regards, guy038

Settings, preferences, auto updater; I would need to change that across 100+ servers… Use powershell (or whatever other IT tools you have access to) to edit config.xml on all those servers with one simple script to change <GuiConfig name="noUpdate" .* autoUpdateMode="[01]">.*</GuiConfg> to <GuiConfig name="noUpdate" .* autoUpdateMode="2">no</GuiConfg> We have already made the decision that asking is important enough to be the default, can we go the next step and just do it in the background and not interrupt work flow getting it done? That’s the idea behind the silent-at-exit, which mostly doesn’t interfere at all. There also exists the MSI installer now, which allows IT departments to better control the install process – I don’t pretend to understand its benefits or how to use it to the full effectiveness, but I’ve been told it makes corporate environments easier or more convenient. One of its options is NOUPDATER=1, which allows you to completely turn off auto-updater on the installed Notepad++, which then means that the corporate scripts are in charge of running the MSI from the central location on your schedule, rather than allowing each of the 100+ servers to decide it’s time for them to update on their own schedule, breaking users’ workflows. Edit; what is being discussed here is the “tyranny of the default”. The vast majority of users are going to leave it default so for that audience is it better to have a workflow with some interruptions or a workflow that doesn’t interrupt them and leads them to a hopefully more secure installation? And the majority of single-user environments can click Yes (silent) once every couple of months. And if they set it to on-exit rather than on-startup, it shouldn’t even need to ask them to close Notepad++. One extra click every month or two doesn’t seem too onerous to me. YMMV. “hijacking the open tab of the thing you were working on” and “just not on the active tab for that View” sounds like the same thing with different words to me. Sorry, since you were using your own terminology, rather than Notepad++'s terminology, I thought you were describing a situation that didn’t exist, and was correcting that. If you’re using different terminology, that’s fine, but don’t be surprised when people misinterpret you. I disagree that the change.log tab being put in front of your active tab once every few months is a horrible thing, but each person has their own frustration points. As you presumably saw when you created your account and read the “Read this before posting”, this is a Community of Notepad++ Users, so if you want something to change in the product, rather than just talking about it with other users, you would have to follow our easily-findable links to the GitHub issue tracker, and put in requests (after verifying that those requests don’t already exist, opened or closed).

@PeterJones, thanks! It was indeed a fair amount of work. To your question: database IDEs like DataGrip, DBeaver, SSMS or MySQL Workbench do offer visual help, but mostly in a different direction. They show execution plans (how the database runs a query) or let you build queries visually, and they usually need a live database connection. My motivation came from my own work in data warehouse projects. It’s not unusual there to inherit SQL statements spanning several pages, undocumented and unformatted. My first step was always to format them, which already helps a lot to understand what’s going on. The Navigator is the next step: a visual map of the structure, especially for those “monster SQL statements”, right inside the editor, with no database connection needed. “Premier SQL development tool” is a bit much :-) but for reading and understanding large SQL in Notepad++ it should help a lot. @Lycan-Thrope, good description, that’s exactly the idea: understanding and documenting an existing statement rather than generating one. And no, it isn’t limited to Standard SQL. The Navigator visualizes the result of the formatter, so it works with every dialect the formatter supports (30+, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, Snowflake and more). For now it shows SQL statements and DDL. If you run into a statement it doesn’t break down correctly, I’d be glad to get a sample.

Hi everyone, I owe the community an apology. My reply in this thread linked to my own website — that was self-promotional and inappropriate for this forum. The question deserved a straight answer without any link attached. I’m sorry, and it won’t happen again. Thank you to the moderators for keeping this place clean.

It looks like @LucaSorvillo took me up on the recommendation: Created new Issue #18496 , so there’s an “open issue” to PR against Created PR#18497 to implement it as a sub-option of the Tab Bar > Behavior > Vertical option

@Troglo37 , It’s much too late now, but for “open all tabs”, Notepad++ has the session.xml.inCaseOfCorruption.bak, which should be one version of your session file out of date (for example, my session file is dated yesterday at 7:13pm, and my corruption-backup is from 2:37pm that same day). So, in the future, if you open Notepad++, and it doesn’t have all your old session files open, before doing anything (before closing Notepad++ or trying to save or load anything), make a copy of session.xml.inCaseOfCorruption.bak to tryme.session.xml so it won’t be overwritten, exit Notepad++, rename session.xml to bad-session.xml, copy tryme.session.xml to session.xml, and start Notepad++: that should take your in-case-of-corruption session as your active session … so if the previous time you exited and started was good, you should be back to that session. That won’t fix your corrupted stylers (colors). Unless you had a recent change in one off your Style Configurator settings, I am surprised Notepad++ was trying to write to your stylers.xml, because it only tries to write it if there was a change. But maybe the reboot process confused some bit in memory making Notepad++ think it needed to.

@T.I-Digital-Solutions , These super-generic “what’s your workflow?” posts come up every once in a while. Maybe you should try to search up the older ones – they follow almost exactly your wording, so they shouldn’t be hard to find. I don’t seem to remember the original poster coming back and learning anything from them, or even interacting again in most cases, so I don’t know that there’s really much point to them. But since you ask, UDL and built-in syntax highlighting are non-negotiables, and I like the regex-based s+r (though I don’t need the complicated expressions that so many people ask us to make for them). As far as plugins go – for automating stuff for myself, PythonScript and NppExec and QuickText (I set up most of my workflow stuff ages ago, such that I don’t do anything new with those plugins, really… they just sit in the background making my life easier without me thinking about them anymore.) But really, context-less questions like this are meaningless. What features, plugins, etc, would help you depend completely on what you do in Notepad++. If you never touch HTML, then someone saying all their favorite XML/HTML plugins would not help you one whit.

Hi @Karen3D — one more angle worth checking, specific to the Windows 11 update scenario: session.xml is only written when Notepad++ exits cleanly. Windows updates are notorious for restarting the machine and killing running apps before they can save, so the session file can end up out of date or empty even with “Remember current session for next launch” ticked. A couple of quick checks that fit an IT-managed work laptop: Close Notepad++ yourself before restarting or shutting down, and confirm in Task Manager that no notepad++.exe process is left hanging around. A leftover process can hold on to the old session. Open a couple of files, close Notepad++ normally, then check the timestamp on session.xml in %AppData%\Notepad++. If it has not been updated, the write itself is being blocked — roaming profiles or redirected folders on corporate machines are a classic cause. If your files live on network drives, make sure the drive mappings are unchanged after the update. Notepad++ quietly skips files it cannot find at start-up. Worth ruling these out before going any deeper.

I think keeping discussions focused on the original topic helps everyone get more useful answers. At the same time, related side discussions can be valuable when they add context or share practical experience. A clear distinction between the main topic and tangential advice makes the community easier to follow.

Years later, I finally had the time to figure out how to implement “UDL as Default Language” for PR#18499 to close my Issue #11097 and related Issues. It was just just merged, so will be in the upcoming v8.9.9 RC

Echoing what @Lycan-Thrope said — it is worth trying the GDI workaround before settling on the old Compare plugin, because that older plugin is no longer maintained and can develop incompatibilities with newer Notepad++ releases. To try the fix suggested earlier in this thread: go to Settings > Preferences > MISC., find the rendering-mode drop-down (DirectWrite is the default), switch it to GDI, then fully restart Notepad++ and run the same comparison again. The crash appears tied to how ComparePlus draws its difference highlighting under DirectWrite, so GDI sidesteps it. Two extra things worth checking if it still crashes: Test with all other plugins removed, in case something else interacts with it (XML Tools was installed alongside ComparePlus in the original report here). Check whether file size or shape matters — try a small pair of files first, then the large XML files, to see whether size plays a role. If you get a chance, please report back whether the GDI switch helped. The plugin author said a reworked ComparePlus is on the way that should fix the DirectWrite problem, so a data point either way helps everyone following this thread.