NPP does not save a per-file language-lexer choice. The lexer used is determined by the extension lists in the settings for each Language > Define your language... > Ext : (for a given User Defined Language, UDL), and in the Settings > Style Configurator > User ext. and Default ext. (for a given Language lexer).

A User ext. in the Configurator or an Ext. : in the UDL settings will override a Default ext.. If an extension isn’t found in the user extensions or UDL extensions, NPP will search the default extension lists, and hand the file off to the appropriate lexer, if found. If an extension isn’t in any of the lists, then it will be handled as a Normal text file.

So, if you’ve set Ext. : = txt in the User-Defined Language AutoHotKey, then NPP will use the AutoHotKey UDL for the highlighting whenever you open a .txt file, rather than going thru the list of priorities down to the Normal text.

If you don’t want NPP to apply the AutoHotKey formatting to .txt files, you have to make sure that you remove txt from the User-Defined Language settings for the AutoHotKey (and any other user-defined language or style-configurator language).

If you want NPP to apply AutoHotKey to some .txt files, but Normal Text to others, that’s more than NPP is programmed to do. You will have to toggle some of the .txt files manually; or you might be able to figure out a way to program a PythonScript or LuaScript to recognize the specific content when a .txt file is opened, and to have the script tell NPP to either use the AutoHotKey highlighting or Normal Text…) Notepad++'s expectation is that files that want different highlighting will have different extensions (so maybe choose .ahk for AutoHotKey files – though, since I don’t know how AHK works, I don’t know if it has a default file extension, or whether it doesn’t care, or whether it only accepts .txt files).

What categories there are available for a given language are defined by that language’s lexer; unfortunately, you cannot add new categories. (Well, like you saw, you can add anything you like to stylers.xml… but if the php lexer isn’t programmed to match words in that category, and to pass on the category to scintilla to mark it with a particular style, nothing will happen.)

Many of the languages allow adding new keywords to a given category; in php, if you wait long enough on the WORD style, it pops up the default and user-defined keyword lists, so you could add words to that category – however, I don’t see that it’s implemented any other styles of keywords.

So, with the builtin lexer, I don’t think you’re going to be able to add a separate style/category of keywords, sorry.

You might be able to come up with a UDL to highlight the words as you desire (but UDL highlighting often falls short in areas that the custom lexers excel in, so you may have to give up something in order to get the two different categories of keywords).

Sorry, I need to revise slightly my previous answer. If you follow that solution you will finish with 2 lines combined. I’ve actually considered a slightly better answer.

Find: (\R)\R+
Replace: \1

What this does is find the first CR/LF (you may need to replace \R with the correct CR/LF character your file has). Then there has to be 1 or more additional CR/LF characters. We only keep the first CR/LF character, removing all others. This will cater for situation of multiple empty lines together, as \R+ greedily consumes as many CR/LF characters as possible.

I have to ask the question though, is the line truly empty or does it have 1 or more spaces in it? Spaces will require a different expression. If spaces then:
Find: (\R)\h*\R+
Replace: \1
The caveat here is that \h refers to both a horizontal space, a tab and a line feed. Depending on the character set used a \h might also refer to part of your CR/LF. If so then replacing \h with \s might fix it.

Terry

Thank you very much! This is an adequate solution.

Solved, please disregard

My bad - I failed to copy over the global.xml file :-/

Hello, @pratap-chava and All,

Regarding your needs, I think that a suitable regex S/R could be :

SEARCH : (?s-i)^File created by.+?\RMessage log.+?$\R

REPLACE Leave Empty

Don’t forget to select the Regular expresion search mode and to tick the Wrap-around option

Notes :

At beginning of the regex, the modifiers (?s-i) mean that :

The . dot regex character will match any single character ( Standard and EOL chars )

The search is performed in a sensitive way. If you prefer insensitive matches just change that part with (?si) !

Then the part File created by.+?\RMessage log looks, from beginning ( ^ ) of line, for any text, beginning with File created by and ending at the first expression Message log, preceded by a line-break ( \R )

Now, the final part .*?$\R tries to match a range of any character, ending at the nearest end of line ( $ ), and followed with a line-break ( \R )

And, due to the empty replacement zone, all that block of text is, then, simply deleted !

Cheers,

guy038

@Matt-McDowall

Suggestion: Consider the TakeNotes plugin.

@Mikhail-V Who thanks that was the Issue
@PeterJones You also thanks for your help…

There’s also a plugin for Notepad++ called MathPad, which can be installed via the Plugin Manager, with more info at it’s homepage. I don’t know whether it will meet your needs, but it’s something to look into.

Here is me helping you write the script: study the VBScript and/or PowerShell script at the SuperUser question you linked. Tweak it, and see how those changes affect the results. Experiment until it no longer requires the quote marks. Continue experimenting until it does everything you want it to. If you have shown some effort, but still cannot get it to work, ask a question in an appropriate forum, where the topic is about the scripting language you are using (SuperUser/StackOverflow might be a good location).

Some here would be able to use the PythonScript plugin to automate those calculations inside Notepad++. Others might suggest skipping the middle-man: if you have a file with 14000 instances, it might be simpler to run it through an offline script, which could be written in VBA, Python, Lua, Perl, or your favorite scripting language. But it might take a few hours to write something: and that brings me to my last point:

But if by “help me to write a script” you mean, “write a script for me”, then you’ve come to the wrong place. It sounds like you’re asking for custom coding services, which will likely cost you something. Good luck in presenting the question, as framed (ie, without showing any effort of your own), in any coding forum and getting the exact script you want.

@Brian-Phillips,

As it says on the File System Redirector page that ++@Scott-Sumner linked, “32-bit applications can access the native system directory by substituting %windir%\Sysnative”, so if you are using 32-bit Notepad++, and want to edit a file in the OS’s 64-bit system32\Drivers directory, you can browse to %windir%\Sysnative\Drivers or c:\windows\sysnative\Drivers (you can paste that in the File name box, or in the path-box at the top, if you’ve got that displayed), and it will be the files you expected.

@Henry-Vistbacka

As @Mikhail-V suggests, you could do such a thing if you are willing to install and use the PythonScript plugin. Maybe there are other ways as well, but all would involve installing something extra, so why not the PS plugin? :-)

Here’s some quick sample PS code, modify/experiment/enhance as you like:

search_text = '--' replacement_text = 'en-dash' # <----- this is just placeholder, put what you want here def callback_sci_CHARADDED(args): if chr(args['ch']) == search_text[-1]: cp = editor.getCurrentPos() search_text_length = len(search_text) start_of_search_text_pos = cp - search_text_length if editor.getTextRange(start_of_search_text_pos, cp) == search_text: editor.beginUndoAction() editor.deleteRange(start_of_search_text_pos, search_text_length) editor.insertText(start_of_search_text_pos, replacement_text) editor.endUndoAction() end_of_search_text_pos = start_of_search_text_pos + len(replacement_text) editor.setCurrentPos(end_of_search_text_pos) editor.setSelection(end_of_search_text_pos, end_of_search_text_pos) editor.chooseCaretX() editor.callback(callback_sci_CHARADDED, [SCINTILLANOTIFICATION.CHARADDED])