How can the direction be automatically from right to left when opening a file?

FNActivity

Is it possible to direction words from right to left (rtl) when opening a text? If this is possible, how should I achieve this goal? (because my writing language is Farsi)

Mark Olson

@FNActivity
See https://npp-user-manual.org/docs/views/#text-direction

View->Text Direction RTL from the main menu should help you at least in principle. I’m having trouble getting it to show my text RTL. I feel like it was working before and now it’s not.

PeterJones

@FNActivity ,

Those menu commands affect every opened tab – because it’s an editor setting, not a file setting.

Notepad++ doesn’t currently remember your LTR/RTL setting, but there is an open feature request.

If you are willing to use a plugin: with the PythonScript plugin, it would only take a couple of lines of code to have PythonScript change the direction every time you load Notepad++: edit PythonScript’s startup.py to run editor.menuCommand(MENUCOMMAND.EDIT_RTL) and set PythonScript configuration to AT STARTUP instead of LAZY). Restart Notepad++, and it will be defaulted to RTL.

(This discussion is quite similar to part 2 of this later question by a different user; I am cross linking, because readers of this might be interested in new replies in the other discussion, too.)

PeterJones

@Mark-Olson said in How can the direction be automatically from right to left when opening a file?:

I’m having trouble getting it to show my text RTL.

If you look through the change history, there have been a few “RTL” changes over the last year or two.

At this point in Notepad++, I believe it only shows RTL with letters from RTL scripts, but things like selections still behave in a RTL way because of the RTL setting. (Type a quick sentence with your normal text input; make sure you’re on RTL mode, and double-click the first word; notice that the last word is selected; now use Ctrl-RightArrow to move the caret in the “right” direction and watch the cursor jump leftwards.) To have RTL make sense, I think you need to use something like Arabic or Hebrew characters.