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The following strange thing happened:

1. I was trying to save a text file.
2. I choose File->Save As
3. I was curious what would happen if !! and ?? was in filename, I press enter.
4. The list of files in the save as dialog disappers ?!? I was pretty amazed.

Version of Textpad being used is 8.5.0.

Why would these files disappear? At first it seemed a bug? Then I was worried that maybe files were accidently deleted, fortunately not. It also seemed like it traversed to other folder, but it didn't... then I started wondering is this maybe some kind of filter feature?

No, this is not a bug, and it has nothing to do with TextPad either.

What you did was filtering the files already being listed, where "?" means exactly one random character and "*" means zero or many random characters. "!" has no special meaning.

• Search for "*a*" and the list is filtered to all filenames where an "a" occurs anywhere.
• Search for "a*" and the list is filtered to all filenames starting with an "a".
• Search for "!!??" and the list is filtered to all filenames starting with "!!" and having a filename length of exactly 4 (which in your case was most likely an empty list = no matches).
• Search for "*a*a*" and the list is filtered to all filenames where at least 2 "a" occur at any position - can also be "aaron.txt".

Welcome to Windows. This is a feature existing since at least 1995 and is available in EVERY save/open dialog, unbound to which program makes use of it. Try it with Notepad, Paint, Wordpad or any other software - it's everywhere the same. Because the dialog is nothing less/more than the Explorer.

This is also the reason why "*" and "?" are not allowed in filenames, because they're treated as wildcards since DOS (1981) already.