a second Ctrl+F will re-center it

A useful tidbit that I failed to notice in the manual - thank you.

Search > Find, Nothing shows up at all,

Then most likely it is “off screen” somehow (you probably accidentally dragged it off-screen, or it got put onto a different monitor location, then you changed your setup so that monitor no longer existed, or similar).

Assuming you haven’t changed the keyboard shortcut for the Search > Find, then doing Ctrl+F followed by a second Ctrl+F will re-center it in the current Notepad++ window, so it’s easily found.

When I select ‘Search’ then ‘Find’ or any of the options, it was automatically searching for the text where my cursor was at. I turned this off in the settings, but now nothing happens. It’s searching but not letting me enter what I want to search for. I updated to the most recent version, still happening.

I am a bit confused about what is (or isn’t) happening. Your screenshots look like what you did was uncheck Settings | Preferences… | Highlighting: Smart Highlighting: Enable. That should not affect searching at all.

The very first item on the Search menu should be Find…. Are you saying that when you click that, nothing happens at all? You do not see a dialog box?

If you’re seeing a dialog box, then you should be able to enter the text to find. If for some reason you can’t, tell us what’s going wrong.

If you are not seeing a dialog box, try this:

Open Notepad++ so that you are looking at an empty tab. Select Find… from the Search menu. Do you see a very, very faint “something” in the empty space? If so, without clicking anywhere first hold down the Alt key, press and release the y key, then release the Alt key. If you then see the dialog, you had transparency set always on and at the faintest level (almost invisible).