Notepad++: the Macro recorder

In my last post, I detailed how I solved the challenge of finding all the group members of a set of groups containing more than five hundred groups. While the Powershell script was very effective, I needed one more tool in order to really make quick work of it all; Notepad++.

Now, I’ve written about Notepad++ previously, but I’ve never really dived into any of the more advanced features. One of these, the Script recorder, is amazing for tasks such as this, where you’ve got a massive list of group names, and need to perform the exact same sequence of actions for each of them. In this case, I needed to three characters and a line shift, as well as delete a line shift. Here’s how you do it:

1. Paste your list into Notepad++
2. Go to Macro > Start recording
3. Do what you want the Macro to do
4. Go to Macro > Stop recording
5. Use the Macro playback option (Ctrl+Shift+P) as many times as needed (I simply held the key combination down until it was all done)

This took what would have been a highly repetitive exercise, and completed it in less than a minute.