Cursor not working properly

Mainak Gupta

Hello everyone ,
I am facing new thing . I am not sure when and what was pressed - was using the mouse while doing something in notepad++.
Suddenly I see ‘_’ this was coming instead of ‘|’ . I am able to figure that thing and fixed ‘_’ but now I am not able to see ‘|’ , things are coming as shade . How to fix this ? It is important , please help !

PeterJones

@Mainak-Gupta ,

Sorry, I am not sure I understand your question.

But my guess based on “shade” and _ and | – are you talking about the typing cursor, like:

Veritcal Typing Cursor:
Horizontal Typing Cursor:
Box Typing Cursor:

I am thinking you meant “the typing cursor shows up by shading the current text instead of as a vertical bar or horizontal bar”.

So to explain:

By default, Notepad++ uses a vertical typing bar (called a “caret” in Notepad++, as described in the Caret and Cursor section of the User Manual) when you are doing normal insertion typing (which looks similar to |)
If you change to “overwrite/typeover” rather than “insert” mode (by hitting INS or INSERT key on your keyboard), it will switch to underlining the character (which looks similar to _)
Notepad++ has Settings > Preferences > Editing 1 > Caret Settings – and if you change the Width drop-down to Block or Block After, it will show up as a box (“shaded text”) when in insert-mode (but will still use an underline in overwrite/typeover mode)

If this doesn’t answer your question, then maybe screenshots or some more explanation would be helpful. (If English isn’t your native language, maybe try using a different translator… many people like using the DeepL translation website for pasting translations into the forum.)

Alan Kilborn

@Mainak-Gupta said in Cursor not working properly:

I am not sure when and what was pressed - was using the mouse while doing something in notepad++.

No you weren’t using the mouse.
You pressed the “Insert” key, or its equivalent on your keyboard.

I’d have thought this really isn’t a Notepad++ thing, more of a “using a computer 101” type thing, and I fired up Notepad.exe, and it works similarly there…with the absence of any visual cues about what mode it is in! At least Notepad++ gives you a different caret and changes INS in the status bar to OVR (or vice versa).

Mainak Gupta

@PeterJones thanks . I want to bring back the vertical option which is ‘|’ . How can I do that ? Horizontal option just not working for me .

Alan Kilborn

@Mainak-Gupta said in Cursor not working properly:

I want to bring back the vertical option which is ‘|’

It’s probably just as simple as pressing the Insert or INS key.
But if it isn’t, all the information you need to “bring it back” is in Peter’s posting already.