Since the commenters here were wholly unhelpful (and event downright derisive)

I personally thought that @Alan-Kilborn and @Lycan-Thrope were both very helpful 2 years ago: one explained how to do it as tersely as possible, and the other prodded him to expand, trying to avoid assumptions about the understood terminology – and answering the question and prodding to make it easier to understand are not derisive in any way, shape, or form.

The closest to derision was my claim that a post that something as generic and unhelpful as “the user typically needs to activate the feature by selecting a specific key combination or by accessing it through the editor’s menu or toolbar” – that’s literally how you use a Windows program, yes, but it says nothing sepecific about the specific keystrokes or menu commands to use to accomplish the specific goal (whereas Alan did provide specifics) – was just calling out a reply that appeared to be LLM-created. I am sorry if you are offended that I call out unhelpful LLM posts as such (and nowadays, I’m less diplomatic, since LLM nonsense is expressly forbidden in this forum), but that’s one of my jobs as a moderator.

But on to the actual content:

In order to get Notepad++ to do tab manipulation similar to Visual Studio with block selection, all you need to do is bind the Tab key to Edit > Indent > Increase Line Indent.

Interesting. I cannot get that to do the same thing as VS:

First, to confirm what VS does:

Column/Rectangle/Block selection:
a1d1763b-39e9-4454-a058-6d25f2216100-image.png TAB:
97bfc51d-d287-49bd-82bf-f3fbd69c4623-image.png

So VS does add indent at the start of the Column/Rectangle/Block.

Now let’s look at what N++ does “out of the box” with a Column/Rectangle/Block selection in the middle of a line:

Column/Rectangle/Block selection:
3e3fe79c-ae0a-4ab0-ad9c-7eb90892c8d8-image.png

Normal, unchanged TAB:
5d248285-46a6-4790-b4a3-c5639bc10aa3-image.png

This is the undesired behavior.

Now, instead, do what @Alan-Kilborn suggested in 2023:

do a zero-width column-mode selection instead of a multi-character column-mode selection:
3cc5a79c-63a6-436e-902b-0992aa057c17-image.png

Then hit TAB, and it will indent from that location, without deleting any characters:
30fb7403-b379-41d9-932c-866f80a2b9da-image.png

Now, to look at your suggestion

Change the Increase Line Indent to use the TAB key (and remove any conflicts elsewhere):
1f38f6d2-bc5a-4e53-b912-146f145b3e3a-image.png

Do the Column/Rectangle/Block selection in N++:
782acaac-b3d8-4c0d-b71f-879eb45f32fa-image.png

And then hit the newly-mapped TAB:
70b5473f-1625-422d-a31e-22dd52a51be8-image.png
… noticing that the results are the same as in step 4: it overwrites the characters.

So @Alan-Kilborn’s suggestion is able to mimic the results of VS, though the selection has to be a little different to get it to overwrite nothing.

Whereas Notepad++'s original behavior is identical to the behavior when I follow your instructions: it overwrites the selected text with the tab (or spaces, if you have space-indentation enabled in N++)

So did I miss something from your instructions? Or are you seeing different behavior with Notepad++ v8.8.5 than I am?

@Augusto-Cesar-Santini ,

Under normal circumstances, TypeScript is not “blank”:
f4dfe6ae-b151-473c-bac9-4dbd1800cd34-image.png

What Theme are you using? Default (stylers.xml) or one of the other Themes?

Please note that themes and stylers.xml aren’t updated automatically when you update Notepad++, so your theme might be out of date, as described in the themes section of the user manual . But some themes, even fully up-to-date, are missing many of the Languages that stylers.xml or the DarkModeDefault theme provide. In that case, I recommend using Plugins > Plugins Admin to install the ConfigUpdater plugin, which can find any languages that are missing from your theme and put in dummy values; after a restart of the app, there will at least be entries, even if the colors aren’t the best or necessarily distinguished from each other.

@jeddahcpu said :

I can’t make text from right to left in new versions

@Coises Thanks

Hello, @h-jangra, @peterjones and All,

Peter, I suppose that the @h-jangra’s project is defined in :

https://github.com/h-jangra/NppVim

And that his first release can be donwloaded from :

https://github.com/h-jangra/NppVim/releases/tag/v1.0.0

Of course, I have not tested this plugin yet !

Best Regards,

guy038

@Coises said in Can't print with notepad++:

I’d say No Background as the default,

Congratulations. That’s the default already.

And, as you say, the warnings probably aren’t worth the effort.

have a separate theme for printing which doesn’t change when you change the display theme

Ick. As I said above, that breaks the expectation set up by literally every other application I can think of having printed from in the last decade or two. If the visual area has color inherent to the display, the general expectation, in my experience, is that it will print in that color… not some other set of colors which I have to pick or set somewhere other than my primary color choices.

Printing of text files to dead trees should be rare enough that most people don’t care; printing to PDF, you want the color to match exactly. Since Notepad++ cannot tell which you are doing (it’s the OS, not the app, that knows what printer you send to), there’s another reason to not have a separate printing theme or other such workaround.

People getting colors the same between screen and print should be the default; anything else breaks reasonable expectation. (Even “no background” being default breaks that expectation, IMO.)

I’m interested in having sticky tabs, ie, tabs that will stay on screen, regardless of how right or left you scroll in your tab bar. I could use multi-line tabs, but that takes up vertical space. This is kind of like freezing columns in Excel.

Hello everyone!

There were a few annoying bugs in the latest release, I’ve fixed them in a Pull Request.

In case my PR is not accepted, I’ve made a v2.7.rc.3 release available in the forked repository. I hope this helps others too!
https://github.com/Krazal/WebEdit/releases/tag/v2.7.rc.3

@webforpcnet seen similar issues before, also with other tools. Thing is accessing network drives (and even external plugged drives) triggers security and caching tools such as anti-virus, status utilities such as TortoiseGit, etc.

A separate check needs to be done using another crawler, such as a simple script dumping the file contents. Paste something like the following in cmd.exe:

@echo off rem Position in the target base directory pushd \\NAS\shared\code\ rem Iterate through all files in the subtree, assume all files, "*.*" for /R %i in (*.*) do ( echo Dumping '%i' rem Force reading file contents (but don't output them!), same as Notepad++ would type "%i" >nul ) popd

(I’m assuming the \ special character sequence got escaped in the report.)
If the speed is substantially better than Notepad++ then it might mean there’s a problem (this quick/dirty check cannot assess for any whitelisting or heuristics in the environment).

@PeterJones ,
Good point. Luckily, it’s still one of a handful of functionList files…at least until you figure out how to mass produce those. :-)

@Rich said in XML - insert rows without nesting:

I was missing a single “/”

I hate being bit by something so small but dangerous. :-)

If you don’t already have it, XML Tools plugin can help with XML syntax check: it can be automatic or on-demand. (If you are using XML>10Mb, you might not want to automatically do the syntax and validation checks; you can turn on/off those options in the XML Tools menu). But I think it might have helped you find that problem.

Thanks for help!

Glad to help.

@shodanx2:

Take a look at the documentation for Columns++ and see if it will work for you.

One of my goals when I wrote it was to never have to open a spreadsheet program again. (I hate them with a passion.)

It won’t draw the table lines as in your examples; instead, it depends on using tabs to separate columns. The Elastic tabstops option makes tabs adjust to the width of the column content.

You can do various column-oriented operations, such as sorting, searching, aligning left, right or numeric, and creating new columns based on calculations from other columns.

You can install Columns++ from Plugins Admin.

@Mark-Boonie

It looks to me like Notepad++ can’t load the font you’ve chosen, and it has fallen back to a default system font. I might be missing something, but the font of your text looks to me to be the same as the font that shows the filename in the tab and the title bar.

Can you verify that if you select a really common, system-supplied monospaced font, like Courier New, you get what you would expect?

What is the font you’re trying to use? If appropriate, could you tell us where you got it?

@PeterJones said in How to open documents in different windows?:

Settings > Preferences > Multi-Instance and Date > ☑ Always in multi-instance mode – every time you use Windows Explorer to double-click on a file (or similar) to open it with Notepad++, it will go in a new instance. (This will not change the behavior of File > Open inside Notepad++, which always opens in a new tab, not a new instance.)

Thanks for the answer.
Everything works.
Issue resolved.
Notepad++ is my favorite text editor.

Special thanks to you for the clarification about the publication of posts and for additional information on the topic of the question.

@Artem-Repko
@PeterJones correctly pointed to the D&ump selected text as JSON string(s) and Dump JSON string(s) as ra&w text commands in JsonTools. I just wanted to add this comment because I just added new documentation for both of those commands.

@TBugReporter

Sounds like the bug I fixed for the v8.7.5, so try to update to any N++ v8.7.5+ (ideally to the latest, as of now v8.8.5)

Hello,

Thanks a lot for your great and swift answer

@kilson69
Notepad++ does not normally need internet to function, so this is probably due to a plugin or an unusual installation.

I would recommend that you share your debug info (?->Debug Info... from the main menu) and hopefully a forum regular will be able to use that information to give you more informed guidance.