FYI, v8.9.2 RC has been updated to RC2:
https://github.com/donho/notepad-plus-plus/releases/tag/RC2
See original announcement for more information.

@pasha-19 said in styler.xml/WordsStyle/keywordClass association with langs.xml/Language/Keyword/Name:

I was looking to add a WordsStyle with a keyword list to an existing language.

That’s not the way it works. Existing languages are hardcoded (compiled) internally with a list of available styleIDs, and only particular styleIDs have keyword lists associated with them. You cannot just add a WordsStyle with its own styleID and a list of keywords, and hope that the lexer will magically see them. It will not.

My question concerns the styler.xml/WordsStyle/keywordClass that appears to match langs.xml/Language/Keyword/Name. There are some seemingly standard keywordClass values instre1, instre2 and type1 to type7 and maybe type8. Do these seemingly standard values have any additional meaning besides providing a link from the keywordClass in styler.xml to the Language/Keyword/Name in langs.xml?

They have an integer value (0-8). Those correspond to the 9 available keyword lists inside the lexer, which any given lexer may reference zero or more of.

If you use the wrong keywordClass, Notepad++ will not be able to pass the list of words to the lexer. And if you make up a keywordClass or use one that’s not already defined for a given language, the lexer won’t see it, and those keywords won’t get highlighted.

[can] any keywordClass/Name that matches could be used?

Nope, sorry. Each lexer has a predefined list that Notepad++ will pass on to the lexer and that the lexer will recognize.

To sum up: the official list of available keywordClass/name values for any given lexer are listed in the copy of langs.model.xml that ships with a given version of Notepad++: that will always list all the ones that Notepad++ knows about, and if you try to define others than those for any given language, Notepad++ cannot pass it on to the lexer.

However, it may be that your langs.xml or stylers.xml are out of date. If you haven’t updated to v8.9.1 yet, run that update, and the first time you run, Notepad++ will update langs.xml and stylers.xml (or any other active theme) to include any missing styles. You might find that the language you want to customize has more keyword lists available in the Style Configurator now.

If a given language doesn’t have enough different styles to give you differently-colored sets of keywords, you cannot just trick Notepad++ into creating more for you. However, using the EnhanceAnyLexer plugin (you can install it using Plugins Admin from the Plugins menu), you could define a regular expression to match the keywords you wanted. For example, for a given lexer language, if you wanted to add three keywords with red foreground and four with a blue foreground, you could use the following in the EnhanceAnyLexer configuration file (whcih you can easily access using Plugins > EnhanceAnyLexer > Enhance current language.

[LexerName] 0x0000FF = \b(red1|red2|red3)\b 0xFF0000 = \b(blueA|blueB|blueC|BlueD)\b

This will give:
ad688e24-5716-46a9-beae-934a6017df82-image.png

The EnhanceAnyLexerConfig.ini has documentation in its comments, explaining that it’s 0xBBGGRR for the hex colors, and how to get those colors to only apply within certain parent styles, etc. And https://github.com/Ekopalypse/EnhanceAnyLexer/ is the homepage for the plugin.

@PeterJones
Fixed.
Thank you for reminding me!

@Alan-Kilborn
Current line background colour is now white, also tried minty green
Selected text is now the minty green
Multi-selected text color is also minty green

minty green for all 3 then Current line background colour white.

green-white.jpg

@Mister-Smitt said in Where does this nasty line highlighting come from??:

2026_02_12_22_0838.png

How to fix this?

Read this FAQ

And I would like you to spit in the face of the person who did this when you are next to him.

Okay, I just spit in my own face. Does that make you feel better?

(New features sometimes have bugs. The new feature of updating your horribly-outdated theme to give you access to all the modern styles that have been hidden from you for years was a great idea, but the original implementation, under certain circumstances, had unintended side effects. And the relatively few people who updated to v8.8.9 or 8.9.0 have to go through a bit of extra effort; those who skipped those two versions will not have the side effects. But if spitting in my face helps you, go ahead.)

Moderator note: with the recent post in this Topic, my attention was drawn here. And I saw that at least one of the most recent links was a malicious download site, so I removed that link. But that has made me revisit all the links in this Topic. Any that are direct links to an actual alternative editor’s official site, or a github page, are left. Ones that are ad-ridden “blogs” with dubious reviews of editors are being removed, because they are all years out-of-date and/or possibly malicious downloads: honestly, if you can type the words “alternative for Notepad++ on Mac”, you can do your own modern websearch and find dozens of those “alternative to” websites which claim to review applictions, and we don’t need this forum to be a link to outdated ad/“review” sites; such links are not helpful to anyone here.

I have been using Notepad++ for years. I frequently get this message, usually after a Windows 11 restart.
84e247a1-494a-4e82-8eec-d4fd39f06a65-image.png

I’ve updated Notepad++ whenever prompted, I’ve reinstalled to try to fix the problem. The problem seems to come with the program. I don’t know why I would get this message or what they want ME to do about it. I don’t even know where to find the extra DLL.

Help?

@FreeMeow Thank you!

@PeterJones said in "In Find, Regex Search in Current File Limited to "Find Next" Downward Direction Only":

Perfect, thank you for the explanation about how the config file is managed.

One point: I was the one who hallucinated, trying to find a reason for this limitation in regex usage.

Thanks for the clarification!

Much appreciated!

@PeterJones , Perfect, many thanks,

@PeterJones
Thanks for the clear explanation, That really cleared up my confusion. I appreciate you taking the time to break it down and explain what actually happened and why updating is safe now.

@donho ,
Thanks for the verifcation, and sorry for the late reponse, I came down really sick that night for about a 5 day period after posting this, and am just getting back into the swing of things. Just wanted to make sure we didn’t need to be redundant about that process. Thanks again for the clarification.

@fml2 said in Feature Request / Question: Soft Wrap at Vertical Edge (Column 80) regardless of window size:

@Coises Thank you for the quick implementation! If enebaled, it applies to all documets, not just the current one, right?

Yes, I made it a single toggle for all documents in both views.

It would be possible, but considerably more complex, to track documents and enable/disable per document. (I do it with elastic tabstops in Columns++.)

@Coises This is an excellent solution. Not only did it solve this specific issue for me (as I transition away from my job, and need to save out many learning notes), but this taught me new tricks that I didn’t know Notepad++ was capable of. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge.

@PeterJones I managed to do it, I uninstalled it again and when it asked about settings, I answered no, upon startup it was like a completely new installation.Screenshot_1.png nnn.png
When I started up, I changed the theme and it worked, thank you very much for the tips.

Hello, @mark-boonie and All,

I said in this post that we can translate the regex’s logic to :

What_I_do_not_want(*SKIP)(*F)|What_I_want. See also the excellent article, on this topic, at https://www.rexegg.com/backtracking-control-verbs.php#skipfail !

But, regarding your present example, @mark-boonie, I suppose that we should invert the logic and tell :

What_I_want_to_keep(*SKIP)(*F)|What_I_want_to_delete

This means that any multi-lines block, with delimiters Block start and Block end containing the string 80     00010000 is not considered ( text is skipped ) and that any single line contents, with its line-break, due to the (?-s) modifier, must be deleted

Note that the use of the Backtracking Control Verbs (*SKIP) and (*F) is not mandatory at all ! we could have used this syntax, instead, for similar results :

SEARCH (?s)^\*Block start\h*((?!\*Block start).)+?80 00010000.+?^\*Block end\h*\R?|(?-s)^.*\R?

REPLACE (?1$0)

We simply change the non-capturing group (?:(?!\*Block start).)+? into a capturing group ((?!\*Block start).)+?

We tell that, in replacement, we must rewrite any block entirely ( $0 ), if the group 1 exists, thus the (?1$0) syntax

And, as there is no colon char and text after (?1$0, nothing must be taken in account if the group 1 is absent, which is the case in the (?-s)^.*\R? part !

Best regards,

guy038

This issue has been fixed:
I did the following. As I use a inline style sheet I created a “css color.css” file in Notepad++. Just a blank page that I can do the following:

I can now paste my HTMLPad 2025 css code into Notepad++ with the colors I changed under Settings> Style Configurator.

I also created a “html-colors.html” blank file and I can copy the html code with colors that Notepad++ provides that has been updated in the Style Configurator.

Next I highlight the text then go to “Plugins” on the toolbar then “NppExport” then “Copy all formats to clipboard”.

I can now paste in the html/css code into Word with the colors I want.

I still cannot create a style in Word 2024 with colors as I suspect it would be too complicated for Word to figure what parts the different text it should color.