@westyles said:

I have a rule for code: universal, effective, easy, fast

Good luck achieving all of those all of the time.
Or do you have a “pick any 2” or “pick any 3” type rule? ;-)

@El-Greco-0 ,

The Ctrl+Tab / Ctrl+Shift+Tab is the “Document Switcher” feature. By default, Settings > Preferences > Misc > Document Switcher has ☑ Enable MRU behavior checkmarked, which turns on Most Recently Used (MRU) order for the Ctrl+Tab order. If that is unchecked, then the Ctrl+Tab order is determined by the order of the tabs in the view, so if you turn off that option and use Window > Sort By > Name A to Z, then Ctrl+Tab will follow alphabetical order.

The reason why Ctrl+Tab defaults to MRU, is because it is often (maybe even mostly) used as the quick/simple “swap between this tab and the last tab I used”, rather than cycling through the entire list. Also, there is a separate set of keystrokes, Ctrl+PageDown for next-tab and Ctrl+PageUp for previous-tab, which already follows the order of tabs in the view (so also affected by the Window > Sort By > … sorting), so it’s already easy to navigate between tabs in the view order by another similar means – so again, it makes sense to default the Document Switcher Ctrl+Tab to use Most Recently Used behavior…

@mpheath @PeterJones
Thank you both for identifying the fault, although your discussion is a bit above my head :)

Just to check my understanding, Notepad++ is using a 3rd party plugin to do the formatting? and the suggestion is i install an alternative styling plugin for notepad++ which will override this new styling plugin which will allow me to revert to the former behaviour?

Does anyone know an effective solution to the black square instead of the cursor issue?