Find and Add To Selection In 7.7

Alan Kilborn

This is multi-selection !!!

Yes. But maybe I am not understanding the fascination. As the OP mentioned in the first posting in this thread, there’s been “workaround” ways (see the link in that first posting) to achieve this type of multiselection for a long time…and all of the above in THIS thread is still workaround.

What is really needed to make this complete is a good interface within Notepad++ itself (no scripting plugins). Then, when someone posts to the Community “I can match the text I need by doing a regex-find, but how can I copy that text to a new document?”, we can finally give them a good answer. And by good I mean one that doesn’t start out with “Install a scripting plugin…”. Not that there’s anything wrong with scripting plugins, but it is just too cumbersome for someone that has a single need.

Ekopalypse

@dinkumoil - I guess your nppexec script can be reduced to this

sci_sendmsg SCI_SETSEARCHFLAGS SCFIND_WHOLEWORD
sci_sendmsg 2690  // SCI_TARGETWHOLEDOCUMENT

sci_sendmsg SCI_GETSELECTIONEMPTY
if $(MSG_RESULT) == 1 then
  sci_sendmsg 2688  // SCI_MULTIPLESELECTADDNEXT
 
sci_sendmsg 2689  // SCI_MULTIPLESELECTADDEACH

What do you think?

dinkumoil

@Ekopalypse said:

What do you think?

Except the missing endif ;) - nice catch, it works!

Seems like SCI_MULTIPLESELECTADDEACH needs an active selection and SCI_MULTIPLESELECTADDNEXT doesn’t.

EDIT: Seems like even the endif is not necessary, I apologize. ;)

Ekopalypse

@dinkumoil

aahhhhh - I constantly forget about using it. :-)
Yes, it works without but as the syntax defines it, it should be used, imho.
Who knows what a future update will do.

guy038

Hi, @alan-kilborn and All,

I admit that my enthusiasm is a bit excessive ! Just because I’m rather an old guy, which knew MS-DOS 5.0, WinWord 6 and Excel 5 and, even, some older goodies. So, I’m a little overwhelmed to see all these new powerful features ;-))

By the way, I’m no longer surprised to create rectangular selections, over, let say, 50,000 lines , with N++, for years now ! Quite similar, except that all the cursors are aligned ;-))

Cheers,

guy038

cipher-1024

I thought this was a three post thread and then it was done! NPP Community delivers! I wound up putting @dail 's LuaScript into the startup script for the Lua plugin and it’s working great.

Out of curiosity I tried installing NppExec on the 7.7 minimalist install and trying out @dinkumoil 's script but it would only select the current word and never go into multiedit mode. (7.7 32bit, NppExec 0.6RC3). There are no errors in the console. I don’t know if the minimalist version and my older, installed version are conflicting in some way, but I couldn’t get the script to work.

@Alan-Kilborn , thanks for the python script, unfortunately I’m still on 1.0.8 so I haven’t tried it out yet. But once I’m back to being current, I will.

My job is being inconvenient and making me do stuff, so I need to sit tight on upgrading for a bit until I have time to iron out any old plugin issues that I may run into after the upgrading. Thank you one and all. This is a great community.

dinkumoil

@cipher-1024 said:

trying out @dinkumoil 's script but it would only select the current word and never go into multiedit mode.

I guess you only tried the first or second version of the script. The final one and the shortened version of @Ekopalypse some postings above should work.

Alan Kilborn

@cipher-1024 said:

I tried installing NppExec on the 7.7 minimalist install…and trying out the script…but it would only select the current word and never go into multiedit mode

Multi-editing is disabled in a clean install or a portable install:

Imgur

Did you go into the preferences and enable it like this?:

Imgur

Alternatively, this can be added at the top of the NppExec script, to turn multi-selection ability ON:

sci_sendmsg 2563 1

Here’s where the 2563 comes from, in the Scintilla interface file:

# Set whether multiple selections can be made
set void SetMultipleSelection=2563(bool multipleSelection,)

Alan Kilborn

…and I guess for the same reason the Pythonscript presented earlier could benefit from the addition near the top of:

editor.setMultipleSelection(True) # in case not enabled in the Preferences

cipher-1024

@Alan-Kilborn , you got it in one. Who would have thought you’d have to enable multi-edit to multi-edit… NppExec script is working on my 7.7 test install. Thanks again.

AndreCunha

Besides enabling Multi-Editing (as explained by @Alan-Kilborn in his comment), I just had to call the functions directly, just like Scintilla documentation specifies:

SCI_MULTIPLESELECTADDNEXT adds the next occurrence of the main selection within the target to the set of selections as main. If the current selection is empty then select word around caret.
SCI_MULTIPLESELECTADDEACH is similar to SCI_MULTIPLESELECTADDNEXT but adds multiple occurrences instead of just one.

For me, it was unnecessary to call SCI_TARGETWHOLEDOCUMENT, so, for selecting all instances of the word at once, you could just call SCI_MULTIPLESELECTADDNEXT followed by SCI_MULTIPLESELECTADDEACH:

// selects all instances of the selected word (or the word around the caret)
sci_sendmsg 2688 // SCI_MULTIPLESELECTADDNEXT
sci_sendmsg 2689 // SCI_MULTIPLESELECTADDEACH

…which has the same effect of simply calling SCI_MULTIPLESELECTADDEACH twice:

// selects all instances of the selected word (or the word around the caret)
sci_sendmsg 2689 // SCI_MULTIPLESELECTADDEACH
sci_sendmsg 2689 // SCI_MULTIPLESELECTADDEACH

Or, instead of blindly calling it twice, you could check if something is already selected with SCI_GETSELECTIONEMPTY (as used on other comments) and then call it only once:

// selects all instances of the selected word (or the word around the caret)
sci_sendmsg SCI_GETSELECTIONEMPTY
if $(MSG_RESULT) == 1 then
  sci_sendmsg 2688 // SCI_MULTIPLESELECTADDNEXT
endif

sci_sendmsg 2689 // SCI_MULTIPLESELECTADDEACH

PS: It would be really nice to have both commands (SCI_MULTIPLESELECTADDNEXT and SCI_MULTIPLESELECTADDEACH) available for hotkeys in “Settings” > “Shortcut Mapper” > “Scintilla commands”.