#4 Forcing specific file to stay on left of screen on Compare macro call

[Mitch Torrens]

Jean-Sébastien,

First off, excellent program. It works exceedingly well and will save me many hours of time!!

Short version of question: Is there any way to ensure that two files being compared will show up in a certain order on the screen when the compare macro is called? Right now, pressing the Compare macro hotkey in N++ when two files are open seems to arbitrarily reorder which file comes up on the left and which on the right.

Longer version: I'm writing a VBA project right now in Excel for managing our shop files, and part of the functionality involves comparing revisions of files coming in to our machine shop managers so we can keep track of which revisions should be kept. They will be checking many revisions, and so it is important for me to make their workflow as repeatable as possible so they don't end up mistakenly throwing out recent revisions.

I'm trying to make the compare process as automatic as possible right now -- essentially, from the VBA environment, I'm using shell script to open N++, close all open files from the previous instance, open two specific files (one-at-a-time) by calling their respective paths, and call the compare macro. I've tried changing the order of the files being opened, open and close them in a specific order, etc., and it seems like calling the compare macro arbitrarily picks one of the two files to put on the left or right of the screen. Is there any way you can think of that I can force the older revision to always come up on the left side of the screen? The only identifiable variable between some of the files we will be comparing will be the path itself, and so automating a file check and conditional switch in a N++ macro does not seem to be possible.

Thanks again for your work putting such an effective macro together! Let me know if anything comes to mind.

MT