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!

@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.

@David-Smith-2

Isn’t it a combination of two different types of styling, one being “selected text” and the other being “smart highlighting”?

So…if you changed those two styles to be the same color, I think you’d achieve your goal.

But…I think your goal is misguided…but you be you.

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.

This issue has been fixed:
I did the following. As I use a inline style sheet I created a “css color.css” file in Notepad++. Just a blank page that I can do the following:

I can now paste my HTMLPad 2025 css code into Notepad++ with the colors I changed under Settings> Style Configurator.

I also created a “html-colors.html” blank file and I can copy the html code with colors that Notepad++ provides that has been updated in the Style Configurator.

Next I highlight the text then go to “Plugins” on the toolbar then “NppExport” then “Copy all formats to clipboard”.

I can now paste in the html/css code into Word with the colors I want.

I still cannot create a style in Word 2024 with colors as I suspect it would be too complicated for Word to figure what parts the different text it should color.

@Magic-Mugs ,

Assuming all your open files are real files, and all in the exact same folders on old and new machine, then just copy over %AppData%\Notepad++\session.xml

If some of your files are the unsaved new # tabs, you will also need to copy over everything in %AppData%\Notepad++\backup\

But if you want all the same settings from your old to your new, just copy over everything from %AppData%\Notepad++\

@nikkinisly ,

The thing truly named “Plugin Manager” was last compatible with Notepad++ in v7.5.9 from October 2019. Had you really not updated since then?

Or are you talking about Plugins Admin? That’s the builtin replacement since v7.6 in November 2019

And it’s still in v8.9.1:
0e15144b-967e-42d8-a505-a19330607d00-image.png

My guess is that you deleted gup.exe and/or other of the content in the updater folder, or the plugin list DLL. To find out:

Exit Notepad++ Perform steps 1-3 for each of the following files List of files C:\Program Files\Notepad++\notepad++.exe C:\Program Files\Notepad++\plugins\Config\nppPluginList.dll C:\Program Files\Notepad++\updater\GUP.exe C:\Program Files\Notepad++\updater\libcurl.dll If any of those files are missing, you will need to reinstall, making sure to include the auto-updater and Plugins Admin, because all of those files are required for Plugins Admin to work Steps Right click on the file and choose Properties Look to see if it still has the Unblock checkbox If it does, checkmark it, then click Apply / OK

here is an example of a GUP.exe that still has the mark of the web:
9baed526-5a1a-4497-a75b-1acdc23f3b85-image.png

After making sure the Mark of the Web is gone from all those files, then restart Notepad++, and Plugins Admin should be there.