Well, my answer was meant to imply that you shouldn’t use the “function list” feature for what you desire, which wasn’t quite clear with your first posting but is really clear now.

My first (new) thought was that you seek something called “context-sensitive help”. That would be where you type a built-in function name and press a key combination and a window pops up with help on that function. This seems achievable (seen it with other languages; don’t use PHP so no knowledge on that, maybe someone else…?). But maybe you are saying you don’t know the names of the functions, so to type them first and then get help on them doesn’t really work.

If you have the autocompletion feature turned on, then when you type the first few letters of a PHP keyword or built-in function, then a little window will show up with suggestions on how you might finish the word. This is helpful if you know the first few letters of what you want.

The above options rely on you knowing at least the first few letters of the function you need, so again maybe not ideal…

Perhaps more of what you need is the PHP language reference (built-in functions section) available in an offline-viewable format. Again I don’t know PHP but for the languages I use this is something that is also easily obtained.

What I was asking for was if there was a way for me to be able to search for and view php built in functions on notepad++ without going to the php website. If i want a fucntion to minipulate a string, I minimise notepad++, go to a browser and search for functions on the php website (and I need to have internet access to do that so I cannot search while in a plane for example). I was wondering if I could somehow “download the list of of built in php functions” then make them available for searching offline through notepad++ (or perhaps via any other tool). But accroding to your answer, there is no such a thing

That doesn’t make any sense. The function list pane is so you can quickly jump to the source for YOUR functions. For built-in functions you don’t jump to their source, you just use them in your code.