Installation of Light Explorer was not a issue. All I had to do was to click on Plugins > Plugin Manager > Show Plugin Manager to bring up the built-in plugin manager to install the Light Explorer plugin.

Listed there are dozens of plugins created by the developers or users of the service. From plugins that let you customize the program’s toolbar to a document monitor or translation plugin. Plugins can be easily installed by selecting them first, clicking the Install button afterwards and restarting the program when the installation has completed.

The issue that I experienced was that the graphical user interface of the program was not starting up anymore after installing Light Explorer. I checked the Windows Task Manager and noted that Notepad++ was running in the background.

Since I had only installed that one plugin I was pretty sure that it was the culprit that prevented the program’s gui from starting up. This happened on a Windows 7 64-bit system.

The idea now was to disable the plugin and see if that resolved the issue I had with Notepad++. After some looking around I discovered that Notepad++ plugins are installed as dll files in the Notepad++ directory on the hard drive.

I went to C:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++\plugins and found the LightExplorer.dll plugin in the root directory there. Copied and moved it to a backup location, killed all Notepad++ processes in Windows before I deleted the file. The program started up fine once again after the operation.

We have covered Notepad++ plugins in the past which can be really helpful under certain circumstances. One of the most useful plugins for users who work with Notepad++ regularly is the Autosave plugin.

The plugin can be downloaded from the developer’s website. It needs to be extracted into the plugins folder of the Notepad++ installation (the folder might need to be created if this is the first plugin).

The new autosave option becomes available after the next program start once the two files have been placed in the plugins folders.

Autosave can be configured to automatically save documents if the application loses focus or at time intervals with the default interval set to one minute. It is furthermore possible to only save the current document or only named ones so that these temp documents that some users like to create do not get saved on the computer system.

Adding plugins is a breeze. Notepad++ comes with a plugin folder that is a subdirectory of the root directory of the installation. Just place all downloaded plugins into that directory and they will automatically be recognized by Notepad++. If the plugin directory is not existing create it. The plugins can be configured from within Notepad++ by clicking on the Plugins menu in the toolbar.

The removal process works the same way, just delete files in the plugin directory to remove a plugin that you do not want to use anymore.

The main plugin page lists 26 plugins for the latest version of Notepad++. Here are the ones that I found useful and decided to install:

• XML Tools – XML Checker. Can auto-close tags and provides other useful features.
• Hex Editor – adds a Hex Editor to Notepad++
• Compare Plugin – compare two text files.
• FTP Synchronize – modify and upload files directly to a ftp server.
• Multi Clipboard – add up to ten text phrases to the clipboard.
• Windows Manager – great if you work with many open windows at once regularly.

Those are just five of the 26 available plugins. Most have been written for special purposes and are probably not useful to the majority of users.