Notepad++ Capitalize Every First Letter of Every Word - regex

Question

Input: "notepad++ capitalize every first letter of every word"
Output: "Notepad++ Capitalize Every First Letter Of Every Word"
I have been attempting to capitalize the first letter of every word using ctr+F and regex.
So far I have been attempting to use find:\b(.) or \<(.) with replace:\u\1 but this results in all of my letters being capitalized.
I have made due with ^(.) & \u\1 followed by \s\b(.) & \u\1.
However, this seems silly to me as there are many posts talking about using the start of word boundaries. I am just having difficulty making them work. Thanks for your consideration!

Answer 1

Background
According to Notepad++ specification (see Substitutions section), there are three operators that can be useful when turning substrings uppercase:
\u
Causes next character to output in uppercase
\U
Causes next characters to be output in uppercase, until a \E is found.
\E
Puts an end to forced case mode initiated by \L or \U.
Thus, you can either match a substring and turn its first character uppercase with \u to capitalize it, or match a character and use \U/\E.
Note that Unicode characters won't be turned uppercase, only ASCII letters are affected.
BOW (Beginning of Word) Bug in Notepad++
Note that currently (in Notepad++ v.6.8.8) the beginning of word does not work for some reason. A common solution that works with most engines (use it in Sublime Text and it will match) does not work:
\b(\w)
This regex matches all word characters irrespective of their position in the string.
I logged a bug Word boundary issue with a generic subpattern next to it #1404.
Solution #1 (for the current Notepad++ v.6.8.8)
The first solution can be using the \w+ and replace with \u$0 (no need using any capturing groups). Though this does not mean we only match the characters at the beginning of a word, the pattern will just match chunks of word characters ([a-zA-Z0-9_] + all Unicode letters/digits) and will turn the first character uppercase.
Solution #2 (for the current Notepad++ v.6.8.8)
The second solution can be implemented with special boundaries defined with lookbehinds:
(?:(?<=^)|(?<=\W))\w
And replace with \U$0\E.
The regex (?:(?<=^)|(?<=\W))\w matches an alphanumeric only at the beginning of a line ((?<=^)) or after a non-word character ((?<=\W)).
The replacement - \U$0\E - contains a \U flag that starts turning letters uppercase and \E is a flag that tells Notepad++ to stop converting case.
Edge case
In case you have hyphenated words, like well-known, and you only want the first part to be capitalized, you can use [\w-]+ with \u$0 replacement. It will also keep strings like -v or --help intact.

Answer 2

A simpler regex that worked for me:
Find: (\w+)
Replace: \u$0

Answer 3

There is a shortcut available in Notepad++ v7.3.2 to capitalize every first letter of every word.
ALT + U
Not sure about prior versions.

Answer 4

Uppercase The First Letter Of Every Word:
Use the shortcut: Alt + U
lowercase the first letter of every word:
Use the shortcut: Clt + U
Shortcut working in version 7.6.3

Answer 5

I have achieved something similar by recording a macro that uses the following replacement.
Find what: ([a-z])+
Replace with: \u$0\E
Tick 'In selection'
This is the resulting macro that I extracted from C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Roaming\Notepad++\shortcuts.xml.
<Macro name="Title Case" Ctrl="no" Alt="no" Shift="no" Key="0">
<Action type="3" message="1700" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="" />
<Action type="3" message="1601" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="([A-Z])" />
<Action type="3" message="1625" wParam="0" lParam="2" sParam="" />
<Action type="3" message="1602" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="\L$0" />
<Action type="3" message="1702" wParam="0" lParam="898" sParam="" />
<Action type="3" message="1701" wParam="0" lParam="1609" sParam="" />
<Action type="3" message="1700" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="" />
<Action type="3" message="1601" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="([a-z])+" />
<Action type="3" message="1625" wParam="0" lParam="2" sParam="" />
<Action type="3" message="1602" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="\u$0\E" />
<Action type="3" message="1702" wParam="0" lParam="898" sParam="" />
<Action type="3" message="1701" wParam="0" lParam="1609" sParam="" />
</Macro>
Extra: you can add this to your right-click context menu (contextMenu.xml) using:
<Item MenuEntryName="Macro" MenuItemName="Title Case" />