This has bothered me for a while now: it's about the constraints the SmartHighlighter has in place, i.e. finding occurrences in the active editor, when text is selected.

I would expect it to automatically highlight all occurrences of "FOO" in a snippet like

1 FOO BAR
2 FOOBAR
3 BARFOO
4 FOO-BAR
5 BAR_FOO

when any of the "FOO"s is selected, yet it only highlights the one succeeded by the minus in line 4 and only when selecting any "FOO" surrounded by word-boundaries.

From the SmartHighlighter.cpp

//The word has to consist if wordChars only, and the characters before and after something else

FindOption fo;
fo._isMatchCase = nppGUI._smartHiliteCaseSensitive;
fo._isWholeWord = true;

I assume the whole word matching is there for performance reasons? Could we get a switch for this anyway, as already exists for the case-sensitive option?