Make chrome open a search from the address bar in a new tab (when you want it to)

Sometimes I want chrome to open a new tab for a search done in the address bar, but not all the time.

In order to do this without messing around with the chrome settings and making it a permanent feature, just press the Alt key before hitting return when you've entered your search into the search bar.

Fixing notepad++ file associations

I decided to move from using the ANSI version of notepad++ to the Unicode version but upon doing so I managed to royally screw up the file associations for files with the extensions .txt, .sql, .log etc.

The best I could manage was having them open with notepad.

Open with Notepad++ was missing from the right click context menu and when I tried to select a program to open text files with Notepad++ wasn't listed. Even when browsing to the location of the Notepad++.exe file this wouldn't work.

Turns out something got buggered in the registry settings.

For the key...

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Notepad++_file\shell\Edit\command

this had been changed to some office type MS monstrosity.

I changed the value for the (Default) String and replace the file path to the path to where Notepad++ resides, in my case...

"C:\Program Files\npp\unicode\notepad++.exe" %1

note the "%1" refers to the file name being passed to the command.

This then allowed me to select Notepad++ from the open with context menu and then tell XP to remember the file association.

UPDATE: Something else stopped "Open with Notepad++" appearing so what I did was went through all registry keys searching for "Notepad++" and where an old file path appeared (I had paths for older versions of NPP appearing in "open with" shell commands) I replaced these with the correct file path for notepad++.exe.

Working ok now.