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.

@J-Mark-Barfield , that was not a “regedit”, that was a normal command-line command all those two commands did was run an instance of notepad++.exe without RunAsAdmin privileges, even before you made the change to the executable compatibility settings it was completely unnecessary all you had to do was exit Notepad++ application completely (so it wasn’t running), then do the steps I explained to get notepad++.exe to not run as admin, and then the next time you ran Notepad++ (either using your shortcut or double clicking on the exe or running the exe from the command line normally or double clicking on a text file or right clicking and choosing Edit with Notepad++) would have run Notepad++ not as admin if you didn’t exit Notepad++ first, then the still running Notepad++ instance would still be running as Admin. Changing the exe properties while the exe is running doesn’t magically drop the running Notepad++ out of Admin mode. And thus your right click would not have worked, because the running Notepad++ was still in Admin mode. all you did by doing those extra commands was close the Notepad++ that was running as admin open a new instance that wasn’t running as admin change the exe properties so that it wouldn’t run as admin next time (I understand that you got it working, so you don’t really care at this point. But I don’t want future people to read this discussion, and come to the wrong conclusion that they need to do your extra steps. Those steps were completely unnecessary.)

@Passant-Delarue , Initial guess: turn off “. matches newline”, otherwise your .* will greedily match the whole file.

Since it’s essentially working at this point, I’ve renamed the Topic to “BETA” @mpheath , I have updated the README at https://github.com/pryrt/NppPlugin-HiddenLexers to enumerate available options I think I’ll be patient, and give the beta test a while longer, so won’t try to rush to release it before N++ v8.9.8’s PluginsAdmin list is finalized.

@Krzysztof-Blachnicki said: I deleted ExtSettings.ini (which was 0 byte) and… It works again. Maybe it’s n++ fault, but… For other plugins settings aren’t gone and when files are 0b they don’t cause glitchy behaviour. I’d bet it’s rather a problem with this particular plugin. If deleting the ExtSettings.ini caused the problem to go away, then I am confident it is the plugin, not Notepad++ itself, that is the culprit. The question is what now? Whom I can ask for reaction? Report the problem to @dinkumoil , the author of the plugin => https://sourceforge.net/projects/extsettings/support

@PeterJones Okay, yes, there are several subdir in that folder that are links (issue #18248). Actually, the first subdir is a plain one and is displayed whereas the second one is a link and is not displayed while preventing the display of the remaining data. I’ll give the RC a try. Thanks again.

@Coises said: Notepad++ won’t let the selection that results from a search split a CRLF line ending. As you can see, it moves the start of the selection from the actual location of the match to after the line ending. I noticed that in a Lua script recently that the Scintilla positionAfter function treats CRLF as a single UTF-8 character. So the CRLF has become what some may call an unbreakable sequence in some situations.

@annettekusma said: I also need to be able to move around paragraphs easily during the writing process # header paragraph before paragraph with no enter newlines, but just use line wrap. this allows you to use Ctrl+Shift+Up/DownArrow to move it up or down paragraph after [image: 1785854639307-moveparagraph.gif] I might want to have a couple of textfiles for the larger documentparts though, but I would want to drag a pragraph from one document to another. You would have to have both files open in Notepad++ tabs, and drag the text across between views (or use cut from one tab and paste into the other) automatically created table of contents, That is a word processor / desktop publishing software feature, not a feature of a text editor. Notepad++ can show the list of “functions” in the Function List panel, and for Markdown, I have headers defined as functions ⇒ here is the simplistic functionList definition I use for Markdown. If you put it in %AppData%\Notepad++\functionList as udl_markdown.xml, and then add <association id="udl_markdown.xml" userDefinedLangName="Markdown (preinstalled)"/> in your overrideMap.xml file in the same directory (if you don’t already have one there, copy c:\Program Files\Notepad++\functionList\override_map.xml into the AppData locaton) . But that is only visible inside Notepad++ itself, is not inherent to the file, and is dependent on having the functionList definition mapped in the overrideMap. You can come close to what you want in Notepad++, but it will never have all the features you have requested, because Notepad++ is a text editor, not a desktop publisher, and to expect a text editor to behave like a desktop publisher is to invite disappointment.

@ILoveSkilledCoders said: Unfortunately I don’t understand some of what you said. I am sorry. I thought that explaining to go someplace in Windows explorer and rename files would be easy enough to understand. I cannot make it easier to understand than that. I’m trying to find someone to help explain it to me. & I don’t know what you didn’t understand, so I cannot explain more. to edit those files b/c I don’t want to screw things up & make it worse. I didn’t say to edit any files. I said to rename/copy files. I have no idea if I was in admin mode when I updated. That’s unfortunate. … someone told me you came out with the numbers that tell us how many search results there are, … & then which number result we are on after we press “enter.” I need that so I got excited & updated. Unfortunately it’s not in the Ctrl F search window as I found out. That’s with Search > Inremental Search which brings up the Incremental Search Bar at the bottom of the screen. That’s a simplified version of the search which has always been there, but recently the “live count” was added to the Incremental Search I think I learned years ago that you have to click on Ctrl S at least once to save each file, Each time you hit Ctrl+S on a file, it saves it. That’s the only time that Notepad++ saves it to the given directory. If you only hit Ctrl+S on each file once, then it only saved it once in that directory. The “session snapshot and periodic backup” feature of Notepad++ does not save the file to the normal location. It saves it to the backup directory which I referenced before. In the future: If you want to automatically save your updated/edited files without hitting Ctrl+S or File > Save or the Save or Save All button on the toolbar, you would need to install and configure the AutoSave plugin, as described in the FAQ I linked you to. If you don’t want to install and configure that plugin, then you will have to learn to Save your files on your own. but I had them all saved at one point, otherwise they wouldn’t have been in that Notepad++ folder, so I have no idea what happened. You saved them once, and only once. Never again. That’s what happened. On another note, off & on since the update, I keep getting this error, & then there’s another question after this one which I forgot to take a SS of. https://nimb.ws/i9V1zXa Just paste the image into your post: you don’t need to upload it to a service. [image: 1785784094594-115d78d2-de07-43ff-a056-e06450858f4d-image.jpeg] That means some other program had updated Links.txt since the time you opened it in Notepad++. Your choices are to say “YES”, which will read the copy from disk, and get rid of all your edits, or to say “NO” and overwrite whatever is on disk with what’s currently visible in Notepad++. Which choice is right depends on your computer, and we cannot tell you which is right for you to choose. Also, when I click on Ctrl. F, most of the time it doesn’t highlight & place my cursor in the text field so I can type a new keyword. I had no problems with the other one. That’s controlled on Settings > Preferences > Searching, with the Fill Find Field with Selected Text checkbox and the Max Characters to Auto-Fill... number field. Going back to your original problem: you have probably opened and closed Notepad++ too many times for my file-rename procedure to be of any help. So ignore that part for now. Instead, you will need to open your Windows Explorer (WinKey + E – I believe that worked even back in Win7 days), and then paste %AppData%\Notepad++\backup into the Location Bar of the Explorer window. If your Win7 doesn’t show the explorer bar, then you will have to manually go to C:\users\<user name>\AppData\Roaming\Notepad++\backup\ in Windows Explorer. In that directory, there may or may not be a bunch of files with names similar to filename.ext@yyyy-mm-dd_hhmmss, where filename.ext is the name of the real file, and the yyyy-mm-dd_hhmmss is a timestamp that Notepad++ used. If you have a bunch of those, you can copy those to some safe, temporary directory, and then open all those copies in Notepad++. Look through them, If any of them have the data you want for your real files, then save them to the correct filename in D:\Notes\Notepad++. Close any of them you don’t want. Leave the ones open that you saved to D:\Notes\Notepad++. In the future, either use Ctrl+S (or the menu or toolbar equivalent) to save the file when you’ve made an important change, or set up the AutoSave plugin to save your files for you. If you have difficulty setting up AutoSave after reading the FAQ, please let us know which step of the FAQ you are on and having difficulty with. But I’m not going to type step-by-step instructions for you here, because those instructions are already in the FAQ, and it would be a waste of everyone’s time for it to be typed again here.