What's up with style settings being reset?

PeterJones

Like every other Notepad++ installer for the past N years, the v8.5.2 installer does not overwrite your style settings when it installs under normal circumstances. And if re-installing v8.4.8 went back to your old settings, that proves they weren’t overwritten (otherwise it would not have been possible to go back to those).

Thus, you most likely did something different when you installed v8.5.2 – I am guessing that in v8.4.8 you had a “normal installation” which uses %AppData%\Notepad++\ to store your settings, but when you installed v8.5.2, you accidentally clicked on “Don’t use %APPDATA%” in the installer. (Or, contrariwise, you previously were on a local-config/non-Appdata/cloud-config and you accidentally did v8.5.2 to AppData)

mkupper

@SQLSlacker and @saibotNL - when reporting on misbehavior by Notepad++ it’s best to always include the Debug Info data that’s available from the ? menu. That would take out much of the guesswork on what someone did or did not do when installing Notepad++.

NotepadUser23

I have the same issue after upgrading today. My style theme got reset, and I can’t figure out how to fix it. I definitely did not check the greyed out option to not use %APPDATA%, I just pretty much left everything alone/default on the installer like usual.

bhatmann

@SQLSlacker I had the same issue with the 8.5.3 update. This update changed the theme in Style Configurator to “Dark Mode Default” which definitely has been updated in 8.5.3.

I updated theme to “Black Board”, which is what I had previously, and my individual style updates seems to be still all there. Nothing appears to have been overwritten. Maybe try applying some other theme to see if that works for you.

Again, as many have said, I updated/installed NotePad++ with the default settings (as I always have done for many years now), and this is the first time this has happened.

Zee jee

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Mark Olson

This post is deleted!

_SamboNZ

I get my style settings rest ALMOST every time I do a NPP upgrade.

It’s been happening for more than a year now.

I typically perform an upgrade via in-app prompt. Accept default options and that’s it. Nothing weird.

Happy to provide more info or do testing if needed.

I love NPP, but this drives me pretty crazy :)

Terry R

@_SamboNZ said in What's up with style settings being reset?:

Happy to provide more info or do testing if needed

You say you perform the upgrade “in-app”. Supposedly you are using an installed version of Notepad++, not a portable version.

You also say “ALMOST every time” this occurs. That would suggest you can almost replicate the environment in which it occurs.

So some questions:

Do you actually shut down Windows, or leave it running, possibly allowing it to “sleep”, and therefore NPP could also be “sleeping”? You might know it better as hibernate.
If you do make changes to NPP’s settings, do they stick between sessions? So upon closing NPP and restarting, does the change stick?
Are you running NPP in “Admin” mode, or just normally? This info can be obtained by using the ? menu, then Debug Info. Copy that and paste it into your next post here.
Do you remember anything different that occurred when you did upgrade and the style settings weren’t reset?

This issue has been mentioned by several users over the years, but no-one has ever been able to replicate the problem. And by design the upgrade does not overwrite settings for the installed version. It will however reset all settings in the portable version, but that isn’t updated in the manner you stated.

Terry

mkupper

@Terry-R said in What's up with style settings being reset?:

Do you actually shut down Windows, or leave it running, possibly allowing it to “sleep”, and therefore NPP could also be “sleeping”?

Many end users may not know the answer to this. For many years I have typically done a full shutdown at the end of the day and a reboot in the morning. I want a fresh clean slate at the start of each day. When I migrated from Windows Vista to Windows 10 (I skipped 7 and 8) I noticed that my machine did not seem to be doing a full shutdown/reboot. Visually, it appeared to be doing so but I could tell that some of the background stuff was not fully reset each day. I discovered that Microsoft seemed to have added a “fast boot” hybrid of sleeping and hibernating to make the system appear to be booting and ready to use faster.

At the time I dealt with it I discovered it was quite a struggle to fully disable the “fast boot” system. These days others have fine tuned the process and Google finds articles such as this one which also talks about the lengths Microsoft seems to be going through to evade, discourage, or prevent people from disabling fast boot.

To get this back on topic, it may well be the OP’s Notepad++ is not fully reset and reloaded from its configuration files each day and that’s why the styles seem to be retained.

It give apps the appearance of apps starting quickly Microsoft has also introduced that “apps” are started when a system boots and are resident but hidden in the background until the user wants to “start” them. I did not think that Microsoft was now doing this with traditional .exe “applications” such as Notepad++ but it’s something to keep in mind.

guy038

Hello, @mkupper and All,

Reading your post reminded me of the Fast StartUp feature ! And, after some Google searches, I succeeded to fully understand all the stufff !

By default, the Fast StartUp feature is generally activated, meaning that when you stop your system, all is saved in the hiberfil.sys file

Thus, the next start of your system is quicker than it would be with a classical Cool Boot !

But the Fast stattUp feature may cause problems in 5 cases :

When a device has crashed and the system is unstable
When your need a system update
When you use a dual-boot system
When you use encrypted disks
When you want to access the BIOS/UEFI settings

So, in order to force a full shut-down of your system, you can choose one of these 4 methods, below :

Hold down a Shift key when you stop your system
Restart your system ( Indeed, restarting a system forces a full shutdown, first ! )
In a DOS prompt, valid a shutdown /f /s command
Permanently deactivate the Fast StartUp feature, referring, for example, to this method :

https://www.howtogeek.com/856514/how-to-disable-fast-startup-on-windows-10/

To be convinced, simply do these two tests :

Open the Task Manager, click on the Performance tab then click, on the left, on CPU board and, finally, note the current UpTime value at the bottom
Now, click on the Start Menu, then click on the Power button and choose the Shut down option.
Once your system is off, hit the Start key, on your keyboard
Open again the Task Manager, click on the Performance tab then click, on the left, on the CPU board :

=> As you can see, the UpTime value has changed but is still increasing ! This is expected as the Fast StatUp feature did not stop the system at all

This time, hold down a Shift key when using the Shut down option
Again, hit the Start key, on your keyboard
For the last time, open the Task Manager, click on the Performance tab then click, on the left, on the CPU board :

=> This time, the UpTime value has been reset and should be less than 1 minute ! This is expected as a full shut-down just occurred !

Best Regards,

guy038

mkupper

@guy038 said in What's up with style settings being reset?:

shutdown /f /s

The problem I ran into is that the usual suggestions did not work. I already was using shutdown /f /s and was still getting the fast boot experience where the system up/time and “boot time” would be from days ago.

The fix for me was to disable hibernation using powercfg /hibernate off though my notes don’t say if I did that from a normal or administrative command prompt.

To get this back on topic I have been mulling over at times about if it would be worthwhile for Notepad++ to have a log file that left a record of key things such as the location of the .exe, if another instance was detected and control passed to that, and possibly even the full path to every file the person edited. It seems common issues are “where are my files?” and “my configuration/settings changed in an unexpected way.” At present it’s a guesswork process.

One issue is there is not a single consistent place that’s writable among the various operating systems and types of users. The %TEMP% is usually available but its location changes. For example, with older versions of windows running things in “administrative” mode kicked you over to the Administrator user space which has its own %TEMP% folder.

Some users of Notepad++ have a business or enterprise environment with more than one person using Notepad++ at the same time on a machine. %TEMP% will be different for each user.

Anyway, it’s an interesting problem but would also take much guesswork out of this particular thread for example.