FYI, v8.9.2 RC has been updated to RC2:
https://github.com/donho/notepad-plus-plus/releases/tag/RC2
See original announcement for more information.

@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However, it may be that your langs.xml or stylers.xml are out of date.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!

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.

@Jay-S

I replied here.

@David-Brown i came here to let you know that my receipt had what appears to be his email address on it (which i’ve blocked out here for privacy):

2a1a9747-0e42-4d15-80d0-eb4737ffabd4-image.png

seems legit to me, but i can’t know for sure. :)

@Ilhan-Yumer ,

The developer does not read most posts in this Forum. If you would like to suggest such a move to the developer, I would recommend creating a new Issue at GitHub requesting it (https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issues).

Turns out it was an issue with the GPU driver, which has now been patched.

@Nppenjoyr ,

See this post

@Tavi ,

As far as I can tell, they were unrelated. Scanners such as VirusTotal look at the executable itself, and last year were being triggered by the lack of signing and the self-signing of the executable.

please confirm if this issue is related to the notepad++ hijack news dated 2nd Feb 2026?

The issue you are referring to, as linked here and described in detail here specifically said,

the compromise occured at the hosting provider level rather than through vulnerabilities in Notepad++ code itself.

This was a website hack, and VirusTotal and other such AV scans do not detect website hacks, as far as I understand them.

See the FAQ, which has the best “table of contents” for the website hack. ALL related followups/discussions must go in Topic: autoupdater and connection to temp.sh.

@D-Kirkpatrick said in Editing the Shortcuts File:

However with this latest version there doesn’t seem to be a way to do this?

Nothing has changed regarding shortcuts.xml in the last many versions.

I know there is a copy in %appdata% but that also had my changes.

It depends on your settings, but the %AppData%\Notepad++\shortcuts.xml is the normal first place that Notepad++ will look.

if that’s not working for you:

confirm you follow the normal incantation for editing config files (ie, close all N++, open just one, edit file, save, exit and restart N++ to allow the change to take effect) if that doesn’t work, grab ?-menu’s Debug Info and share it with us share the actual XML snippet from the right shortcuts.xml file, so we can look to see if we can tell what’s wrong

update: I just re-read your post, and noticed:

When I added in the appropriate line to the XML file and saved it nothing happened and the pull down menu did not change.

You have to exit Notepad++ after saving, then restart the application. Notepad++ doesn’t just re-parse shortcuts.xml when you save it, so the menu won’t change by just hitting save on the file.

@George-Warriner,

My best guess is that it was referring to this conversation

@Markus-Louw ,

You mean this box?

See that X on the upper right, right where Windows dialog boxes normally have their X close symbol? You click it to close the message so that you can type.

@jterrain said in how to make tab bar appear vertically in notepad ++:

but implementation of actual vertical tabs would work better.

We have a Feature Request FAQ:
https://community.notepad-plus-plus.org/topic/15741/faq-feature-request-or-bug-report

@Pierre-de-la-Verre said in No solution for using as Preview Handler?:

I looked around and it seems that there is no (common) way to activate / to configure the “Preview Pane” in Windows Explorer on “Win Server 2019” to display common files like logs, txts and so on.

Notepad++ doesn’t have a preview pane natively. Are you using one or more plugins? If so, which plugin(s)?

Or are you saying that you would like to tell Windows OS to use Notepad++ as the preview tool for those kinds of files? My guess is that would require that Notepad++ add hooks to handle whatever special message Windows sends to request generating the preview. Yeah, I found this 2019 feature request that requested adding such a feature. You could go upvote that request… Also, there’s a discussion from 2021 about the possibility of this feature, as well.

(On Github I found a fork which offers this, but I would like to prefer a solution with / within the “official version of NotePad++”)

I couldn’t find that fork easily. If you pointed a link to that fork in the official feature request issue, it might give a volunteer the context and information needed to be able to try to incorporate it into Notepad++.

@Omar-A ,

Search has a “regular expression” mode which will be able to search for anything matching a pattern. Since I assume you want to also delete the matching </span> to go with it, then I believe a regex like the following will work:
FIND = <span data-path-to-node[^>]*>(.*?)</span>
REPLACE = $1
SEARCH MODE = Regular Expression

That worked on the first three spans in your example (and would’ve worked on the fourth if the final /span> wasn’t missing the <)