However, the developer of Notepad++ does what he wants (it’s his football) and apparently he doesn’t want to bring this back, at least not so far…

“does what he wants” sounds a bit harsh imho

i guess don didn’t do what he wanted, but what the community demanded at that time, based on the majority of complaints against as good as no “wow this is a cool new feature” feedback.

i think if you or me would run such a project, we’d turn our backs pretty quickly abandon it, or simply stop sharing, doing all coding just for ourselves.

maintaining a motivation to run such a wide spread project is one of the most difficult things.
especially if we keep in mind, that the majority of users never post if they are satisfied, but just if they dislike something or have found an issue with a new feature.

@4272005
if you hold shift, while clicking on find next, you’ll do a “find previous”
(same function as the << find button)

easy to use by using up or down radio button

If the pre-7.4.2 up/down radio buttons are “easy to use” for this, I can’t see why the post-7.4.2 Backward direction checkbox is not just as easy.

There are many advocates for the version 7.4.2 <<Find and Find>> buttons making a return appearance (they were removed because the implementation was only half-baked and broke other features). However, the developer of Notepad++ does what he wants (it’s his football) and apparently he doesn’t want to bring this back, at least not so far. :-D

Have the forward and reverse search buttons, in the search dialog box been removed after version 7.4.2 ?

YES.

Is there anyway to enable them in later versions?

NO, not unless the developer decides to reinstate them