Notepad++ highlight occurrences of selected text

I know that I can double click a word and Notepad++ will highlight all instances of that word within the document. My question is not about this.

Does anyone know of a plug-in or setting which will allow me to select as many characters as I please and highlight all occurrences of those characters?

Given the following text file:

$hey_you = 'hey you';
$hey_me = 'hey me';
$hey_we = 'hey we';

With my cursor I wish to select $hey_ and have the 3 $hey_s highlighted.

Also, if the scroll-bar could behave like Google Chrome's with yellow markings then that would be a huge bonus, too.

Solution 1:

Try the Settings -> Preferences -> Highlighting and uncheck the "Match whole word only" under Smart Highlighting.

That seemed to work for me.

Solution 2:

With my cursor I wish to select $hey_ and have the 3 $hey_s highlighted

Select the text $hey_ and then Menu > Search > Mark All > Choose a highlight style:

Solution 3:

Accepted answer and other are good but I needed to adjust few style to highlight it properly so that it can standout as my default Global override has foreground and background white and black respectively

Settings -> style Configurator -> Global Styles

Then change foreground color and background for below Style as needed:

Selected text color Smart HighLighting Mark Style 1 to 5