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Is it possible to stop appearing in the results when searching in the search bar in Windows 7?

Update: I'm often opening text documents in Notepad++ to paste text to store as a reference or so I don't lose stuff in my clipboard accidentally.

When searching for Notepad++ in the search bar, even if I type in the exact name of the application "Notepad++", the search results always show the old notepad.exe as the first result. This means I have to press the down arrow a couple of times to get the application I want.

If I could somehow remove notepad.exe from the search results, I wouldn't have to do this anymore and it would make me about 2 seconds more productive every day.

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Have you tried simply deleting the short-cut when it appears. –  snowdude Feb 26 '13 at 10:18
@snowdude - ha, this solved it! After deleting the shortcut, notepad.exe still appeared but Notepad++ came before it. Feel free to make this an answer and I'll mark it as such. –  ajbeaven Feb 27 '13 at 3:04
Cool, added answer based on the comment. –  snowdude Feb 27 '13 at 9:10

3 Answers 3

up vote 1 down vote accepted

If you don't need Notepad in the list (which is coming from Program Files short-cuts) simply try deleting the short-cut when it appears. It won't delete notepad but it will remove the short-cut from the results.

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You can negate search filters by appending a dash to them. For example, to search everything except for exe files:

* -type:=.exe

This works both in the start menu search bar and in the explorer search bar.

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Sorry, doesn't quite help my use case. Have added more information in my question now. –  ajbeaven Feb 25 '13 at 3:42

Clearly from your problem description you meant "Start Menu search" instead of "search bar", since you're searching for apps in the Start Menu and not files in Windows Explorer.

I'm assuming you've already associated Notepad++ with .TXT and other extensions, so opening existing files in the program is not an issue. Your problem basically is that you need to quickly launch a new instance of Notepad++ whenever you want to save a block of text, and for this you are opening up the Start Menu and searching for the app each time.

  1. If you need to launch a particular app like Notepad++ so frequently, why don't you simply specify a keyboard shortcut for it? Just right-click the Notepad++ entry in the Start Menu, go to Properties and in the Shortcut key field specify something like Ctrl+Alt+N.

  2. You could also simply pin it to the taskbar and launch it with a single mouse click. Alternately, you can use Windows Key+1 - 9 to launch pinned app 1-9 (see here for more).

  3. You can also save the following as a .REG file and merge it with the registry after editing to specify the appropriate path on your system to the Notepad++ executable:

    Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
    [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\np.exe]
    @="C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Notepad++\\Notepad++.exe"

    After doing this you can quickly bring up the Run dialog using Windows Key+R, type np and press Enter to launch Notepad++.

These are just some of the ways to make it easier to quickly launch apps, I'm sure there are others as well.

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