I would prefer an another option for it.

You are free to request that the Notepad++ developers make this output format configurable. I’d say the likelihood of it happening are close to zero, though.

To make an official feature request, see the how-to here: https://community.notepad-plus-plus.org/topic/15741/faq-desk-feature-request-or-bug-report

In general, I like the current search panel of Notepad++ very much, that is why I would prefer an another option for it. The search result might look like

(file path/filename.extension) line 834: “search result”

with a single list of items (instead of a separate list for each file). It would be great if the presence of file path is configurable and the symbol after the line number is also configurable.

For Excel, maybe I’d suggest a format like:

"File1.txt",834,“a string found No.1”
"File1.txt",838,“a string found No.2”

My first thought was that replacement using regular expressions might help here, but looking at that it became a bit problematic.

If you’d consider using the PythonScript plugin to achieve your goal, I’d be willing to write you a demo script that can do the basics of what you want.

It’s been on my todo list to put together a demo of accessing the Search results panel data in a nice way, and this little problem of yours might be a nice thing to showcase it.

Let me know what you think.

It’s currently not possible.

Is there something behind your need other than a purely visual effect?