How to Wrap text on Notepad++
Line Wrapping is the process of continuing your sentences to the next line when the sentence is full. Without the line/text wrap, the text in the lines is going to surpass the designated space in the text editor, making it difficult to see the entire line fully. Text editors like Notepad ++ will not have the default option of text wrapping set, because incidentally, they are also used for source codes. In this article, we are going to learn how to effectively wrap text on Notepad ++.
Wrapping Text through Word Wrap
This is an extremely useful thing to learn because Notepad++ has the feature set to off by default. Users mostly have to move the horizontal bar from left to right, just to be able to see the remaining text of the line. By enabling the Wrap text option, Word Wrap will keep the size of the lines to the application window, ensuring that there is adequate spacing in each line.
Let us look at some of the steps to do this:
- Open your document in Word Wrap
- Menu>View
- Select ‘Word Wrap’
Now, this is an easy process if you are able to easily locate the Word Wrap option. If there is an icon for Word Wrap available but no shortcut, then you can follow the following steps to make that happen:
- Menu>Settings
- Shortcut Mapper
- Word Wrap Search
- You will see the option of no short cut
- Double click on the blank part below the short cut for Word Wrap
- The next step is to select a keyboard shortcut for it
- Click OK and you have your Word Wrap Shortcut
Alternatively, if you were to look at the Notepad +=+ User Manual, you would find the settings that you need to change as your default setting.
This is what the options for your Word Wrap are going to look like:
- Default- wraps from the last visible column to the first visible column
- Aligned- wraps from the last visible column to the same indent, i.e., the start of the unwrapped line.
- Indent: wraps from the last visible column to the next layer of indent, as opposed to the beginning of the unwrapped line.
- Displaying line number- This shows the line numbers to the left of the text
Setting a word-wrap column
It is also possible to set a word-wrap column. The wrapping column is usually set by a window-width. Doing a word-wrap column is going to get a vertical line made on the document tab window on the column that you need. You can try this out for yourself, even if you don’t have text. Just use a random text generator to generate some text and paste it onto your document.
After this, you can resize the text till it wraps at the column that will be demarcated by the vertical line. Here’s what it is going to look like:
Wrapping in Notepad ++ after N symbols?
If you do not want to wrap all the lines in your text and after specified characters OR symbols, then you can do that as well. Click the Search Menu, Choose Find, and then click the replace button. It is going to look something like this:
In the “Find what” box, you need to enter (.{10}). The value 10 denotes the largest line length of 10 characters for the lines, which you can easily adjust.
After this, in the ‘Replace With” box, you need to input $1\r\n. After this, click the Replace All button. This is going to ensure that your lines wrap up to a maximum character length of 10, or whatever other value you have put.
Wrapping the Line at 70 and over characters
- If you need to do this, then be sure to first backup your file.
- You will need to download a Notepad++ text plugin for this- The TextFX plugin should be a good option for this.
- Put down the number that will represent the length that you want to wrap your text to
- Copy the number on to your clipboard.
- Select the text that you wish to wrap
- At the top of the menu, click on the TextFX plugin and choose the TextFX Edit option
- Lastly, choose the Rewrap text to the desired text character width.
As you can see, adding text wrap to your text in Notepad++ is pretty basic and it is going to serve as a huge advantage because you are not going to have to keep scrolling down to see your text. It is going to be neatly organized according to the column width that you have selected, which is sure to be an easy read through and through.