@Afik-Gilboa said: both of them have the “run as administrator” unchecked. so any ideas why it keeps opening in admin mode? apparently everything running as administrator here, not sure why but it’s everything… I recognize the symptoms - you probably have turned off the Windows UAC completely somehow and at the same time the account, you are logged in, has the administrator rights (then everything launched will have the admin rights as default). Check your Registry for EnableLUA REG_DWORD 0x00000000 in: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System] (click on Windows Start, start typing “Reg” there, click on the Registry Editor (System) app offered and navigate there to the hive path above) If there is that 0x00000000 (OFF), change it do 0x00000001 (ON) and restart your PC.

@KRadiants said: 1: False on both counts. Here is an example line <attribute id="Selectors" type="LSString" value="SelectSkills(ed664663-93b9-4070-a54b-3c7b19c0e7b4,3);SelectSpells(61f79a30-2cac-4a7a-b5fe-50c89d307dd6,2,0,BardCantrip,,,AlwaysPrepared);SelectSpells(dcb45167-86bd-4297-9b9d-c295be51af5b,4,0,BardSpells);SelectEquipment(aab8c5b5-eacf-4867-8e5f-bd4de3a9132e,1,BardInstrument);SelectAbilityBonus(b9149c8e-52c8-46e5-9cb6-fc39301c05fe,AbilityBonus,2,1)"/> There is a blank before, and sometimes there is something before and/or after it Otherwise, this is correct. OK, so in this example you want to end up with: <attribute id="Selectors" type="LSString" value="SelectSkills(ed664663-93b9-4070-a54b-3c7b19c0e7b4,3);SelectSpells(61f79a30-2cac-4a7a-b5fe-50c89d307dd6,BardCantrip,,,AlwaysPrepared);SelectSpells(dcb45167-86bd-4297-9b9d-c295be51af5b,BardSpells);SelectEquipment(aab8c5b5-eacf-4867-8e5f-bd4de3a9132e,1,BardInstrument);SelectAbilityBonus(b9149c8e-52c8-46e5-9cb6-fc39301c05fe,AbilityBonus,2,1)"/> ? If that’s correct, try the same expression I suggested before, except remove the ^ from the front: Find what: (SelectSpells\([\d\-abcdef]+),\d+,\d+ Replace with: $1

@Neculai-I.-Fantanaru said: I already have a very good Python code. But I want regex. The Python code (or other programming language) is the right solution. Regex doesn’t work the way you want it to, and do if you’ve got more than one swap to do per file, regex will not solve your problem.

@PeterJones, many thanks to Your reply. This workaround works perfectly. I searched for this workaround (because I expected that anyone wouls have the same needs) but wasn’t successful - searching for a solution to a problem can be a frustrating experience if you don’t use the right search term(s) — which, of course, you don’t know yet at that stage…

@saintleningrad-prog said: Select text, or place the cursor inside a ^^…^^ tag, press Ctrl+Shift+E Just a head’s up: that’s the same default key combination that decodes HTML entities when HTML Tag is installed. Since plugin commands are mapped in alphabetical order, and the most recent mapping prevails, having both installed will silently block the EncTag’s plugin shortcut from functioning: [image: 1787355567929-enctags-v020-shortcut-conflict.png] One more thing: the text you are passing to the About message box (here) contains the literal Unicode character U+2013: EN DASH. Since the Unicode literal is inside a character string, the compiler interprets everything between "..." as if it were encoded in the operating system’s default, single-byte code page (usually Windows-1252 on English- or European-language PCs). When shown, the emdash becomes the string of nonsensical bytes \xe2\x80\x94: [image: 1787355726977-enctags-v020-mojibake.png] You just need to escape the Unicode literal, i.e., "Ctrl+Shift+E \u2013 ..."

@André-Programmeren said: As far as I remember I stopped and re-started Notepad++ Notepad++ saved it’s current language for that file (plain text) in the session config, then used that saved session config when you restarted. (This is a critical feature when one extension can have multiple meanings, and you have overridden the default language for a particular file) OTOH, if you close the file, Notepad++ discards meta-information, like what language was previously served, and so re-applies its internal rules and will see the UDL extension when you re-open the file.

I simply don’t have the mental space to go through all these documents and give them names and save them and do all the things. I will get there eventually. Then you will likely lose data. But I also observe that my friends are in the same boat, whenever we need scratch space to write something down, we double click on an empty place on the tab bar, a new tab appears, then data is written and pasted and so on… And then click Ctrl+S and save to a meaningful location, while it’s still fresh in your mind. It’s really easy to add that to your mental workflow. I have many old notepad++\backup folder strewn all over the place Crazy. Those are temporary backup folders, and if you’re keeping them as long-term storage, you are asking to lose data. It is a huge burden to handle and search these. When I need to search my stuff I use Voidtools Everything Why not first, copy all except the active (2026-08-19) backup directory, copy them to a known folder in one location – if you need to, make it a hierarchy, like c:\some\path\old-npp-unsaved\, and then have 2022-08 and 2022-12 and 2026-03 and 2024-01 as subdirectories, if you want/need to keep them separate; or, since every file has the datestamp in it already, just put all the contents of each of those in the same c:\some\path\old-npp-unsaved\ … Then, when you need to search your old backup archives, they are in one easy location. And you can just use Notepad++'s built-in Search > Find in Files, with Directory = c:\some\path\old-npp-unsaved\ and ☑ In all subfolders, then just enter your search term in the FIND WHAT box. But getting back at the current matter, I would like to see more of my tabs, on more than one row but not see all of them at once, which blots out all the reader space. So put in a feature request, as described in our feature request FAQ. I was just warning that it might be harder than you think, or there might not be anyone wanting to do it. But since @thomas-knoefel seems to have an idea for an implementation, then there’s likely to be a PR sometime soonish after you put in the feature request, and then it can quickly get reviewed by the developer. It might even make it into v8.9.9 (it’s too late for v8.9.8, since that’s in Release Candidate), but that means it might actually make it soon. https://superuser.com/questions/153109/is-there-a-way-to-manage-tabs-efficiently-in-notepad [image: 1787241672999-4cb4cf53-2459-4854-bdea-040b96b9ef5d-image.jpeg] I tried finding this in my installation but could not figure it out. Seems that it is buried somewhere in the menus, which would make making a habit of using it difficult. The SU answer was originally from 2010 2013, and then edited in 2015, so the description is confusing, especially in 2026. The Session Manager that they mentioned is not “built in”, it is a plugin. Notepad++ has simplistic native sessions, but nothing to the capability of the Session Manager that they were talking about. To install it, the “Plugin Manager” that was described in 2015 hasn’t been compatible with Notepad++ since v7.6 in 2019. Looking at questions and answers from a decade ago aren’t necessarily going to work in modern Notepad++. Instead, that old plugin manager tool was replaced with the builtin Plugins Admin instead in 2019. And the Session Manager plugin that the ancient SU answer referenced does still exist: you can install it using Plugins > Plugins Admin One thing I really which is to also have the ability to have multiple notepad++ window, like multiple firefox windows. That feature has existed for more than a decade (as I said here, just yesterday – why are people just now discovering the multi-instance capabilities, when it’s essentially always been a part of Notepad++). As was said in yesterday’s conversation, you can drag a tab out into empty space, and it will create a new instance; or, not mentioned yesterday, you can use the right-click context menu on a tab then Move Document, or equivalently use View > Move/Clone Current Document…, to then pick Move to New Instance, and it will open a new Notepad++ window. Or at least have floating notepad++ window with just one tab. This would make my life easier organizationally ! Saving files would make your life easier. The thing I find is that if I have something to write, and it’s urgent, I can’t give it a title, a filename or save it, I have a hard time explaining why those extremely easy things are so hard for me, but I simply cannot. You can, actually. It might take a little retraining, but even an old dog can learn new tricks. The ability to “just write” is probably one of the thing I love the most about notepad++ and I wish it were even easier to “sprawl” even more but that it would help me with staying organized without me having to start organizing it. Hopefully, your AI will be able to help you… though I am doubtful of it. Still, I highly recommend setting up true backup, version control, and a saving system going forward, otherwise you will lose data, and there’s nothing that Notepad++ can do to save you from your current risky behavior. Good luck.

@goma-2000 , Your most recent post just quoted previous, not saying anything new. Were you meaning to say something?

@Coises Thankyou so much, I had two question marks near the end of the code block I was replacing with that I hadn’t escaped, so the code got cut off there. I’d blindly assumed NPP’s find and replace didn’t care about escaping because the code is full of all manner of forwardslashes, colons, and angle brackets and they posed no issue.

@dcog989 Thanks for this - if you have any tweaks or updates you’ve made since this comment, let me know!

@LiivaneLord said: I have noticed that I can now take tab and drag it outside window to make new instance of notepad++. Thank you. That’s not a new feature in v8.9.7. It’s been there a long time (as long as I can remember *). There is only 2 bugs - I cant drag modified file and I cant drag new file from scratch. That’s inherent to the design (and nothing new, so not a regression, and thus shouldn’t be in the Release Announcement anyway) To drag a file to a new instance, there needs to be an underlying file on the filesystem, with all the bytes that you want to open in the new instance, because what Notepad++ does is it launches a new instance of the executable, then uses the internal “file > open” command to read the original file off the disk, then closes the old copy from the old instance of Notepad++. If there wasn’t a file on the disk, there would be nothing for the new instance to read; and if there are unsaved changes, then those changes would not be saved to the disk yet, so the new instance couldn’t read those. To protect you from losing all the unsaved text that you’ve already typed, Notepad++ doesn’t activate the “move to new instance” feature when you try to do it with unsaved changes (whether in a new # document, or in an existing file with unsaved edits). The behavior you described is thus “working as designed” to keep you from unexpectedly losing your data, and thus not a bug (and definitely not a regression). *: update: yes, I tried back to v8.0 in 2021 and even v7.0 from 2016, and I could drag a tab from the tabbar to a new instance, even from the 2016 version of the application. Having proven it worked that way a decade ago, I can confidently say that this is definitely not a new feature. since this is not a new feature, and the problems you are describing are neither a problem with a new feature nor a regression in an existing feature, and they don’t belong in the “Notepad++ release 8.9.7” announcement, this question and reply have been forked to a separate “help wanted” topic.

Hi @franz-joli , I haven’t come across such behavior myself and cancelling compare on my side has always been working flawlessly. As @peterjones had already kindly suggested, If you continue to experience such problem you could open an issue here and describe it step-by-step starting with your Notepad++ setup and plugin version (by providing the Notepad++ Debug Info... from its ? menu) and it would be great also if you could provide example files to try on my side. We can discuss the problem further there. Thank you Peter, precise and helpful as always! :)

@Ian-Eales , That sounds more like a feature request than something that used to work but broke during 8.9.7 – so it’s not a regression. The FAQ here explains where requests for new features need to go …

FYI v8.9.8 RC is changed to RC2: https://github.com/donho/notepad-plus-plus/releases/tag/RC2

So if I search using (?=.*Error)(?=.*Foobar1)(?=.*Foobar2) With regular expression and newline checked. I do see it boil down to the files I am interested in. My only other need is to see all the lines associated/contained with the AND. … The first table in the FAQ is just showing the logic for matching all of those terms. Later down in the FAQ, there is another table which explains how to find the exact line that matches all of those terms. In your case, the AND would be (?-s)(?:(?=.*Error)(?=.*Foobar1)(?=.*Foobar2))^.*(?:\R|\z) [image: 1787010625218-59c19de8-1eb3-41e3-9fd1-14abdcb43053-image.jpeg] or, using the Find Results via Find All in Current Document: [image: 1787010757984-6f1d47c5-0787-4257-91c0-22189e1d79fc-image.jpeg] dummy example file to show it working: Blah Error Blah Foobar1 blah Foobar2 Blah Warning blah Football1 blah Football2 Blah Foobar2 blah Foobar1 blah Error order doesn't matter Blah Error blah Foobar1 blah Footbark2 won't match because it doesn't have all three

@Coises said: I expect that Version 0.6.5 will fix this. Noted, thanks again, and I’ll let him know — although he actually doesn’t typically use regex for his own purposes.

Search++ version 0.6.5 is available: Update to ICU 78.3 and use static linking for ICU. This is expected to fix problems some testers have had running Search++ on older systems or on minimal Windows installs (like Windows Sandbox). For most users there will be no functional difference between this version and version 0.6.4. Note: There are five icu——.dll files in older versions of Search++ that are not used beginning with version 0.6.5; so it is best to delete the existing Search++ folder (or its contents) before copying, rather than copying the new folder over the old one.

@PeterJones thanks mate.