Opening file with command line in an existing instance

Eli Grey

I want to open a file via command line in cmd to an existing instance. I know I can set setting to default(mono-instance) in preference settings -> multi-instance setting. But I don’t want to use mono-instance normally, I only want to use mono-instance via cmd.

So is there any possible way to open file in as existing instance with cmd?, while multi-instance setting is on “always in multi-instance mode”.

PeterJones

@Eli-Grey said in Opening file with command line in an existing instance:

there any possible way to open file in as existing instance with cmd?, while multi-instance setting is on “always in multi-instance mode”.

No, but the opposite is easy: if you normally have notepad++ in mono-instance (via the settings), opening a single time in a separate instance from the command line is easy (with the -multiInst -nosession command line arguments)

But, I suppose, if you have the normal settings (stored in %AppData%\Notepad++) with multi-instance enabled, you could run from the command line using an alternate settings directory. So

Copy %AppData%\Notepad++\config.xml to some alternate directory (I will use the example c:\usr\local\apps\npp\altSettingsDir\config.xml)
Edit that new config.xml, and <GUIConfig name="multiInst" setting="2" to <GUIConfig name="multiInst" setting="0" . Save
From command line,
- notepad++ change.log will open change.log using the normal multi-instance rules
- the alternate notepad++ -settingsDir="c:\usr\local\apps\npp\altSettingsDir\" change.log will use the alternate config file location, and thus not use multi-instance mode, and it will pick one of the already-open Notepad++ instances for editing the file

If you like that, you could set up a batch file in your path npp-mono.bat, which would call @notepad++ -settingsDir="c:\usr\local\apps\npp\altSettingsDir\" %*, so that you wouldn’t have to type that long -settingsDir argument every time.

Eli Grey

@PeterJones Oh my gosh, that’s all I needed. Thank you so much, I made batch file also, it makes me so comfortable.