highlighting - Permanently highlight all occurrences of text in Notepad++?

In notepad++ if I select (eg. double-click) a "word", it gets highlighted. It needs to be separated with a non-alpha character from the rest of the text. The highlight remains until the text is selected.

Is there a way to make this highlight "permanent", ie. remain when the word is not selected any more?

Nice to have: can partial words be highlighted?

Just use the mark feature.

1. Open the Search & Replace dialog and go to the Mark tab.

2. Enter your search term and click Mark All.

   

3. All occurrences are now permanently marked:

   

To remove the marks, simply open the dialog again and click Clear all marks.

Alternatively, while you have the word selected, you can use the Mark functionality in the Search menu:

This also allows you to mark all occurrences of a given string in the document (and you can even have multiple markers going on simultaneously).

Please note that both approaches work perfectly fine with partial words. In fact, multiple markers can apply to the same partial string. Here I've used a marker for port and one for mporta: