Works perfectly, thank you.

I get the same results using Scott’s 2018 script.

That old script made some assumptions that weren’t necessarily always true (I think it was written for just the 32-bit Notepad++, and might not have been tried with 64-bit Notepad++).

Even my old statusbar code doesn’t work anymore (which i’ll have to fix, if I ever want to use it again; bummer).

But I knew I had seen successful statusbar interaction at some point more recent than that, so grepped through some of my archives, and found that being explicit about the SendMessage() argument and return types (.restype and .argtypes), and by passing the address of the text_buffer instead of the text buffer itself, I was able to edit Scott’s 2018 script to work in v8.6.9 with either PythonScript 2 or PythonScript 3.

import ctypes
from ctypes.wintypes import BOOL, HWND, WPARAM, LPARAM, UINT

def npp_get_statusbar(statusbar_item_number):
    LRESULT = LPARAM
    WNDENUMPROC = ctypes.WINFUNCTYPE(BOOL, HWND, LPARAM)
    FindWindow = ctypes.windll.user32.FindWindowW
    SendMessage = ctypes.windll.user32.SendMessageW
    SendMessage.restype = LRESULT
    SendMessage.argtypes = [ HWND, UINT, WPARAM, LPARAM ]
    EnumChildWindows = ctypes.windll.user32.EnumChildWindows
    GetClassName = ctypes.windll.user32.GetClassNameW
    create_unicode_buffer = ctypes.create_unicode_buffer
    WM_USER = 0x400; SB_GETTEXTLENGTHW = WM_USER + 12; SB_GETTEXTW = WM_USER + 13

    npp_get_statusbar.STATUSBAR_HANDLE = None

    def get_data_from_statusbar(statusbar_item_number):
        retcode = SendMessage(npp_get_statusbar.STATUSBAR_HANDLE, SB_GETTEXTLENGTHW, statusbar_item_number, 0)
        length = retcode & 0xFFFF
        type = (retcode >> 16) & 0xFFFF
        text_buffer = create_unicode_buffer(length)
        retcode = SendMessage(npp_get_statusbar.STATUSBAR_HANDLE, SB_GETTEXTW, statusbar_item_number, ctypes.addressof(text_buffer))
        retval = '{}'.format(text_buffer[:length])
        return retval

    def EnumCallback(hwnd, lparam):
        curr_class = create_unicode_buffer(256)
        GetClassName(hwnd, curr_class, 256)
        if curr_class.value.lower() == "msctls_statusbar32":
            npp_get_statusbar.STATUSBAR_HANDLE = hwnd
            return False
        return True

    EnumChildWindows(FindWindow(u"Notepad++", None), WNDENUMPROC(EnumCallback), 0)

    return get_data_from_statusbar(statusbar_item_number) if npp_get_statusbar.STATUSBAR_HANDLE else None

With that, an interactive PythonScript console can get the active language correctly from the status bar:

>>> npp_get_statusbar(0)
'Python file'