@guy038 said in Search++: A work in progress:

Thanks for your new Search++_03 release !

Thank you for testing it.

BTW, with native N++ search, the Shift + Enter shortcut is also available when you choose the Regular expression search mode ( with the condition that the regexBackward4PowerUser="yes" option is present within the config.xml file. May be, you could allow it as well in Search++ ?

Regex backward… I have my doubts, but I can leave it open as something I might try to make available some day. When I’ve thought about it before, I get caught up trying to define exactly what it means to match regular expressions backward. Regular expressions can match different lengths depending on where they start. Is the previous match the one that ends at the latest possible position? The one that begins at the latest possible position? The last one that would have occurred before the current position if you matched forward repeatedly from the beginning of the text? The one that would result from reversing both the text and the regular expression (but then what do you do with backreferences)?

Shift+Enter is a different problem. Enter doesn’t work to find: since the Find and Replace boxes take multiple lines, they consume the Enter key. You can use Alt+F and Alt+R (the underlined characters on the Find and Replace buttons), but those combinations are a bit awkward. I’ve been thinking of just making Shift+Enter and Ctrl+Enter do the functions on the Find and Replace buttons — I think those would be more natural than Alt+F and Alt+R for most people (including me). But then it isn’t obvious how access to backward should work. Beyond all that, there is no standard Windows mechanism for keyboard-only access to the drop-down menus on split command buttons. Once you can get to the button without clicking it, down arrow works to open the menu; but you can’t get there with Alt+underlined letter: that does the click action. I haven’t figured out a good way to deal with all of the keyboard navigation obstacles yet.

Which is a long way of saying I don’t know which of too many possibilities I will eventually decide must take priority for keyboard actions, so I don’t know what I can/will do in that regard.

Personally, I think the ICU button should remain available in future versions !

I’ll probably leave the function there… it might be “hidden” (like a Shift-click on Regex) so it doesn’t confuse people who would probably never use it.

Choose the Select > Select in Whole Document option

=> A selection appears with the bottom message Selected 207 matches

Without doing anything else, I use the Ctrl + C shortcut

After opening an other new tab, I was quite surprised that the 207 tibetan chars were not pasted, after a Ctrl + V operation ?!

Then, I understood that the selection is effective ONLY IF :

It’s not that selection isn’t effective, it’s that keyboard focus was still in the Search++ dialog. You have to move focus to the document for the Ctrl+C to work.

You can use Ctrl+N (think “Notepad++”) to return focus to the document, or (as you discovered) click on the tab if you’re using the mouse.

This does make me think I should probably have an option, perhaps enabled by default, to return focus to the document automatically after a select operation, since wanting to copy is probably the most common reason for using select.

(I’ve been bitten by this often enough in Columns++, which works the same way. It’s just so easy to forget that focus is in the dialog, not the document.)

Note that if the Unicode word boundaries is not checked , the (?w)\b regex would also return 176 matches. Thus, a leading (?w) forces the use of the Unicode word boundaries option !

Hmmm… I’m not sure what’s happening there.

Then, reading https://www.regular-expressions.info/unicodeboundaries.html#grapheme, I realized that, presently, the \b regex cannot identify the different grapheme positions !

Would it be possible to add an option for this specific case

In both Regex and ICU, \X matches a single grapheme cluster. In Regex, (?=\X) matches a grapheme boundary; that doesn’t work in ICU. (It looks like in ICU, \X actually matches from the current position to the end of a grapheme cluster. In Regex, the match must begin and end on a grapheme cluster boundary. The Boost.Regex logic already worked that way, but I replaced/extended it to use the grapheme break algorithm specified by Unicode.) \X partially works in built-in Notepad++ search, too, but it misses some cases and falls apart entirely outside the BMP.

Hello,

I wanted to show you the purpose of this function.

Background:

Highlight a term in the browser Search for it in files using Everything via a button (Content) Right-click the found file to open it in Notepad++ and jump to the searched term.

See the video off it on Imgur

I’ve actually been using the editor since I started using computers privately (2008), but I’ve never really explored its inner workings and capabilities. It was never necessary so far—it has everything needed for everyday use.

I also wanted to sincerely thank you again for the prompt help—it was definitely a positive experience.

Best regards,
Björn

Hi, @jak, @peterjones, @pnedev, @phil-pascal and All,

Ah…, OK :! But it’s quite funny, @jak, because it’s exactly what I proposed in my last two posts !!!

Giving the initial contents of your two files :

The Original Music Collection which contains : Coldplay yellow Elton John Rocket man Beatles abbey road Beatles Love me do Beatles hey Jude Monkees daydream believer The New Music file which contains : Beatles abbey road Beatles Love me do Beatles hey Jude Monkees daydream believer The move blackberry way (1) By running a search/ replacement with regular expressions :

I append, at the very end of the New music file, the contents of the Original Music Collection file, after a line of, at least, 3 equal signs, giving this temporary New music file :

Beatles abbey road Beatles Love me do Beatles hey Jude Monkees daydream believer The move blackberry way ========== Coldplay yellow Elton John Rocket man Beatles abbey road Beatles Love me do Beatles hey Jude Monkees daydream believer

Now :

Switch to the New Music file

Open the Replace dialog ( Ctrl + H )

Uncheck all box options

SEARCH (?x-is) ^ (.+\R) (?= (?s) .+? ^===+ .+ ^ \1) | (?s) ^ ===.+

REPLACE Leave EMPTY

Tick the Wrap around option

Select the Regular expression search mode ( IMPORTANT )

Click on the Replace All button

=> You should get your expected New Music file, below :

The move blackberry way Save the modification of the New Music file (2) By using the ComparePlus plugin :

First, use the Plugins > ComparePlus > Diff Visual Filters... option

Check the Hide added/removed lines option and valid this choice with the OK button

Then, use the specific option Plugins > ComparePlus > Find Unique lines

Now, select the New Music file ( IMPORTANT )

Run the Plugins > ComparePlus > Delete all/selected visible lines option

Run the Plugins > ComparePlus > Clear Active Compare option

Finally, save the modifications of the New Music file ( IMPORTANT )

Best Regards,

guy038

@W-Pong said in Columns++, I'd like to *retain* commas when converting to elastic tabs/spaces:

Is there a way to retain the commas?

I made a new release of Columns++ with an option to do that — an additional checkbox in the Conversion settings dialog: Keep separator character when converting to tabbed.

The new release is Columns++ version 1.3.2.

I have not marked the release stable, but I believe that there is very little chance this change will have any unanticipated negative effects. It should be safe to install.

@Dervars14 Just checked and unfortunately the undo, ^Z, does not work. This used to be a more common occurance in the old days, Prior to Windows 7 and back in the DOS days, there was no checking to see if wanted to keep a file, it just got overwritten even if a totally different file, but just had the same name. The way we used to get around this is with a recovery program. The good thing is for a long time, whenever you save a file, it actually saves it to a different area of the dirve, precisely for this kind of incedent.

First important thing is don’t do any work on that drive, if the data is still there, it is not protected, the more you use the computer, the more likelihood those clusters of the drive will get overwritten.

I don’t think Windows has any internal programs, other than the Recycle bin, which is no use here, as overwritten files aren’t placed there. There is a free program called Recuva, from Piriform, the same people that do CCleaner. If possible, try and download this on another computer to a USB drive, as I said, the more work you do on the drive, the chance of losing the data.

The other good thing with using another machine, is you quickly play around with recuva, it is very basic program, the results are in table form, so easy to rearrange. You can save any detected files to the USB drive as well. If you get the file back, then just replace the current one. And this is the way to all learn to do backups more regularly, which reminds me.

@mapsonx,

I previously said,

I am curious where you found such advice.

If you are talking about my reply to your 2025 question, where half of your question was about changing the icons, you misunderstood my answer, because I was talking (at that point) about Notepad++'s built-in icon-replacement, not the Customize Toolbar plugin. And I wasn’t talking about using “action names” in the button at all.

@Claudia-Svenson said in How to set "UTF-8 WITH BOM" as default Encoding even for old but changed textfiles?:

When I load an existing old file (with UTF-8 only), then change something and save it, the old encoding remains.

How can I tell NP++ to apply the new default encoding to changed old files too?

I think you mean you want this to be automatic; but just in case you missed it, you can change the encoding of the file while you are editing it using Encoding | Convert to UTF-8-BOM. You just have to think to do it for every file you want to change.

@PeterJones Thank you. I just found this forum after searching about the multiple line issue. I’ve been using Notepad++ for years, fantastic program. First text editor I’d found that did search and replace on end of line charaters since good old Wordstar.

Joe 0:
check these links:
https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/old-releases

@mapsonx said in Make notrepad++ default:

I read the info here Shell Extension, and here Replacing Notepad with Notepad++ in Windows 10, but I’m a bit anxious about it.

User Manual > Other Resources > Notepad Replacement gives a fuller explanation than some random gist

I’ve been using the portableapps version.

shudder

I’ve had a few issues lately with some other portableapps wiping out profiles.

Considering that they modify the binaries without publishing the codebase changes, in violations of the open source license of the software they “distribute”, you’re lucky if losing a profile is all that happens.

I don’t want that happening with Notepad++, so I want to switch to the regular potable version I just downloaded from here Download Notepad++ v8.9.3.

Good idea.

That said, I need to make Notepad++ the system default.

It seems a mixed bag: wanting it as system default, associated with lots of file types, and using the Shell Extension, but not wanting to “install” it. It might help us give you better advice if you explain what parts of the “install” that you are opposed to. Is it just storing the settings in %AppData% that you don’t like? Or is there something else? The installer can install into any directory, not just Program Files; the installer can choose to not use %AppData% (as long as it’s not installed in Program Files); the installer automatically registers the Shell Extension for you.

That’s when learned it is not simply a matter of doing it in Settings > Preferences > FIle Associations.
So, it seems my only alternative is “Choose default apps by file type”??

You can start with the Settings > Preferences > File Associations. But that uses the ancient method of file association, and modern Windows 11 actively fights against those old-style associations.

Open With is Windows’ preferred method, because they want to make sure it’s the user, not an over-aggressive installer, that is choosing the default app (and that’s something I applaud them for).

If you’ve done at least one Open With, then your registry should have an HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Applications\notepad++.exe “key”. On that key, if you right-click and do a new key as a subkey on it, to create SupportedTypes as HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Applications\notepad++.exe\SupportedTypes. Inside that, you can do new string values, where the left side is .ext (for whatever extension) and the right side is empty. Windows uses this as the way to hear an app say, “I want to handle this type”, and it helps Windows prioritize the app in the Open With and other things.
For the individual file-type extensions, Windows stores them in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.XXX\UserChoice (for example, .txt for the .XXX location), in the ProgId=“Applications\notepad++.exe” value. So, if you created a registry file like

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.txt\UserChoice] "ProgId"="Applications\\notepad++.exe" [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.123\UserChoice] "ProgId"="Applications\\notepad++.exe" [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.456\UserChoice] "ProgId"="Applications\\notepad++.exe"

and ran that file, it would try to set the chosen application for each of those extensions (.txt, .123, and .456) to use Notepad++. (You would, of course, have to edit that file to have all the extensions that you wanted to choose, and to not use the .123 and .456 dummy extensions). But, again, I think Windows OS notices when someone tries to do that, and it might require you to confirm the choice the first time you double-click on such a file.

caveat: playing with the registry, through regedit or running .reg files you find on the internet, can bork your system. these are examples that I believe are safe, but you are responsible for your own system.

I extracted NppShell.dll, but I suppose in this scenario I won’t be using it.

I guess I’m confused. I thought, by your first sentence, that you wanted to use it. Do you want an Edit with Notepad++ entry in the right-click context menu for every file type, whether or not it’s associated with Notepad++? If so, then register NppShell.dll. If not, then I’m not sure why you brought it up at all.

Personally, I find that the right-click version is the easiest way for opening files that don’t default to Notepad++ (for example, editing a .bat, since you don’t want to double-click on a batch file to edit it, since that should be reserved for running it). So whether you choose to use the installer, or manually register it in the portable version, I would definitely recommend using the Shell Extension.

I also need some advice transferring all settings from portableapps.

copy the config.xml and similar XML files . The User Manual > Upgrading > Upgrading a portable edition talks about the critical and less-critical files for getting settings ported over from one portable to another.

@Yan-Serenade

https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issues/16719#issuecomment-4132203721

@dfs ,
We could go a step further and lament that it would be nice if the entire graphical environment of NP++ could be contained in one dialog setting, and then when we switched between Light or Dark, the environment would change all the UI references:

Settings->Preferences...->Dark Mode,
Settings->Style Configurator...->Style:, and the
Settings->Style Configurator...->Select theme:

…could be coordinated to make just switching between Dark Mode and Light Mode change them all, accordingly. As it is, I’m glad to have just found out that the Dark and Light language files can automatically change by setting that one switch in the dark mode file @PeterJones mentioned, and that automatically chooses the correct code coloring file for the environment (Dark/Light) chosen.

@PeterJones

Thanks for your reply. I will give your solution a try as a Macro learning experience. Maybe I’ll find other uses for it.

But, I just came up with a different solution:

I like Notepad++ so far, so I used the preferences to set Notepad++ as the default for a small number of file types I use occasionally. I renamed the extension of the file I use as my daily journal/log from .txt to my initials .th. I used the file properties to open that file with Windows Notepad.

It’s working well for me. I can use my journal/log with Windows Notepad, and everything else uses Notepad++.