You can start the plugin manager of Notepad++ the following way. Start the text editor and then open Plugins > Plugin Manager > Show Plugin Manager on the menubar.

All stable plugins are now displayed in a table like interface. You can display unstable plugins with a click on Settings and the selection of “show unstable plugins” in the new window there.

Plugins are listed with their name, category, version and stability there. A description is displayed below the table when you select one of the plugins in the list. You install plugins by selecting them first (place a checkmark in their box) and then the Install button in the Plugin Manager interface.

The plugin will be downloaded from the Internet and installed automatically. It may be necessary to let the program close and re-open itself to complete the plugin installation.

An alternative to the process described here is to download and install plugins manually. You find a list of Notepad++ plugins on the official Sourceforge project page. All you need to do is to download the plugins there, unpack them and place the dlls into the Notepad plugin directory. The site lists additional plugins that are not available in the plugin manager.

Notepad++ checks for compatibility on every startup. You may receive a message that one or multiple plugins that you have installed manually are not compatible with the installed version of Notepad++ on the system.

I suggest you make sure that you run the latest version of the program before you install any plugins. You can do that from within the application. Click on the question mark in the menubar and select Update Notepad++ from the menu there to run an update.

Notepad++ Plugins

Change Markers

This plugin tracks changes made to documents, and enables navigation between changes, with a distinction being made between saved and unsaved changes. The change indicator is either a bar in the left margin or a specific highlighting.

CSS-Explorer

CSS-eXplorer is a CSS and HTML plug-in for Notepad++. It allows easy navigation and edit of CSS files with Notepad++. Main features:

TreeView: Allows easy navigation in CSS file.
Validation Service: Check errors in CSS file, and provide detailed report.
Web Page Preview: Test your work on CSS file immediately via HTML Web Page Preview Window.
CSS Editor: Add new parameters and design options to CSS file quickly and easily (support CSS 2.0 defines).

Function List

Function list offers a list of functions (or sections) according of the language of current document, in order to access to the function or section you need quickly.

Multi Clipboard

MultiClipboard plugin implements multiple (10) text buffers that is filled up via copying and/or cutting of text.

To paste any text from the buffers, use Ctrl-V or middle mouse click (normal paste):
to paste the most recently copied/cut text Ctrl-Shift-V or Shift-middle mouse click:
to pop up a menu with the text buffer entries. Select the desired menu item to paste it

RegEx Helper

A Notepad++ plugin that allows users to develop regular expressions and test them against their open documents

This is only a small selection of Notepad++ plugins. I have tested them with the latest version of the text editor (Notepad++ 5.9.6.2 at the time of writing).

Are you making use of Notepad++ plugins? If so, which plugins are installed on your system?

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.

Load Times

In my experience, the biggest culprit in load time problems is the numerous syntax highlighting types. Paring those down to just what you need should be the first thing you do. By default, it loads a lot of languages, any of which may be useful to you, but rarely are they all needed. Others, though handy, you really can live without. This can even change over time. For example, I took a C++ class last year and a JavaScript class earlier this year. I don’t really need either of those anymore. I do make and edit batch files often, so while most users will not need that one, I do. Sometimes a file type may not do what you think. In Litestep, .rc files are used to configure it, but the settings for Notepad++ does not highlight it as one might expect.

To trim, you highlighting list, go to Setting > Preferences. Then click the “Language Menu/Tab Settings” tab. From there, move items from the “Available” list to the “Disabled” list.

The next thing to consider reducing is your plug-ins. If you were testing a few out, but do not use them, get rid of them. If you don’t use the FTP module, turn it off. Just keep what you need.

To trim your plug-in list, go to Plugins > Plugin Manager > Show Plugin Manager. Then click on the “Installed” tab. Check anything you do not use (but know what it does) and click the “Remove” button.

If you weed out highlighting before plug-ins, then you can keep more functionality. Remember, all of this is to decrease your load times, so be mindful of that when you go to use the application again. If you see a difference without sacrificing too much, then you are fine. You may want to consider adding useful plug-ins once the useless ones are gone.

Interface

Notepad++ is designed for you to be able to modify the the context menu. By default, there are ten items to turn on and off five types of highlighting. I never used the feature, so I removed it and added ones that I do use. Editing this menu, however, is not simple. You would expect a GUI to guide you through it, but there is not one. Even the help file has limited information. It does refer you to a guide on how to create a custom file. I have included my own to give an idea of what can be done.

The file, named “contextMenu.xml”, is in a subfolder of your user folder.
Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\Name\Application Data\Notepad++
Vista/Win7: C:\Users\Name\Application Data\Notepad++

<NotepadPlus>
<ScintillaContextMenu>
<Item MenuEntryName="File" MenuItemName="Save"/>
<Item id="0"/>
<Item MenuEntryName="Edit" MenuItemName="Cut"/>
<Item MenuEntryName="Edit" MenuItemName="Copy"/>
<Item MenuEntryName="Edit" MenuItemName="Paste"/>
<Item MenuEntryName="Edit" MenuItemName="Delete"/>
<Item id="0"/>
<Item MenuEntryName="Edit" MenuItemName="Select All"/>
<Item id="0"/>
<Item MenuEntryName="Edit" MenuItemName="Undo"/>
<Item MenuEntryName="Edit" MenuItemName="Redo"/>
<Item id="0"/>
<Item PluginEntryName="Spell-Checker" pluginCommandItemName="Spell-Checker..."/>
<Item MenuEntryName="Run" MenuItemName="Google Search"/>
<Item MenuEntryName="View" MenuItemName="Word Wrap"/>
<Item id="0"/>
<Item MenuEntryName="File" MenuItemName="Close"/>
</ScintillaContextMenu>
</NotepadPlus>

The end result will look like this.

Be sure to backup your original and custom file someplace safe. The installer once overwrote the contextMenu.xml in an update. Make sure you edit the file while Notepad++ is closed, which means using Notepad or Metapad.

Go Minimal

From here, you can turn off a lot of parts of the interface. This can save you space or create headaches, but each user is free to decide what they want. The menu, tool, and tab bars can all be hidden from the “General” tab in the preferences. The menu bar can still be accessed by pressing Alt or F10. The toolbar can be replaced with a custom context menu. The tab bar, while seemingly indispensable, can be replaced by holding the right mouse button and scrolling. This is awkward for a myriad of tabs, but convenient for a few.

Summary

If Notepad++ was too bulky for your tastes, I hope you give it a second chance. Even if it is only to confirm my findings of how trimming the fat can speed things up. If you are a Notepad++ user, then I hope you decide to customize the application to your liking. Most of the shortcomings of the application can be solved with a few tweaks.

Actually, I think this is a great idea. Consumers do not want multiple devices to carry and that is the main reason why convergent devices came in to existence. But even as newer devices are brought in to the market by the companies, we find ourselves owning multiple devices that we would love to carry with us. But we also want to travel light. So it’s usually a toss up between cramming the netbook, the eBook reader, the large smartphone and a PMP into your bags or carrying just your smartphone and maybe the netbook.

However, you cannot use either a netbook or a smartphone under direct sunlight and the battery life is usually not conducive to hours of reading. So Entourage’s idea is to give you something that will let you read books and surf the net at the same time.

They give you an e-Ink using eReader screen that is 9.6” diagonal (1200×825 pixels) and has all the features of an eBook reader – like zooming, taking notes directly on the book, glare free screen and the ability to read under direct sunlight. Using its various connectivity options, which I am coming to in a bit, you can choose to store your notes and journals on a server, email them to a friend or just keep them on the device.

The screen accepts stylus input, so you can open a new journal page and draw on the screen. Text can be input by hand or by Bluetooth keyboard. The e-paper is Wacom Penabled, which is how you are able to draw on it. It supports both ePub and PDF formats, so you are pretty much covered on that area.

What is does not have is an attached online store like the new Barnes & Noble’s Nook or the Amazon Kindle. But I do not see that as a deal breaker. There are enough ways to get Books these days.

The netbook side is pretty basic. It has a 10.1” color touchscreen that displays 1024×600 pixels. The two screens are connected with each other and you can view the images on your ebook in full color on the netbook screen. It has a webcam and microphone that allow you capture video, still images and audio respectively. You have the option of hooking a microphone up to it if you want better quality audio recording . It as built in speakers as well. It supports Mp3, MP4 and 3GP file formats.

You can browse the Internet, check and write emails, playback audio and video and type out long documents via Bluetooth keyboard if you so wish. It has an on-screen keyboard that you can use while chatting.

By the way, this is an Android device. No wonder they can claim so many things about the software.

Coming to connectivity, it has a lot of options for you. It has Bluetooth, 3G, WiFi b/g (no ‘n’) along with optional EVDO or HSDPA mobile modem. You can have only one type of modem. Battery life is decent for such a device – 16 hours for the ebook reader only and 6 hours for the LCD screen only. I am suspecting about 8-9 hours with heavy netbook usage from time to time and long hours of ebook reading.

The inbuilt memory is 4GB, with 3GB available to the user, but you can take it up to 32GB with the included SD card slot. There are USB 2.0 ports as well. It will start shipping from February 2010 and is priced at $490. One thing that I do not get is why they charge $40 extra for getting it in a color other than the ‘midnight blue’.

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.

You can use a simple key to add a quick note, just select any text and press ctr+shift+q. Your note will be instantly created, which you can then edit, add a subject to and save. This is not so new, a lot of apps offer this functionality, but the little things that Quotepad offers add a lot of extra to the program.

Just as an example, clicking the taskbar icon brings up a note list. Clicking it again (or double clicking) brings up the interface to add a new note. Simple, but very effective and efficient use interface. You can mark notes, have the whole window stay on top, change color schemes, change reading order, use filters to narrow your notes, Quotepad can become a great research tool, not just a copy-paste companion!

I find it very useful when I’m thinking about post ideas. Even with tools like Google Reader, it is sometimes hard to keep track of what I want to write about, and a quick copy paste into Quotepad is a big help, firstly because I can paste the intro paragraph from a blog post, or a description from the app main page. Quotepad shows the source of the text, so I can save the url copy-pasting time. I can then narrow by keyword, making all my blogging work much easier and faster.

There is not a noticeable difference performance wise considering the program startup time and text loading performance. The Intype text editor uses a tabbed interface to display multiple text documents in the same interface. Plugins – which are called bundles in the editor – are available for various programming languages to add better support in the editor. Support is build in for programming languages like C, PHP, Java and various other scripting languages like HTML, XML or CSS supporting language grammar snippets and additional features.

The project’s website contains downloads for additional bundles that can be added to the text editor. The editor is currently in alpha stage. It can be freely downloaded from the developer’s website. The FAQ states however that the editor will not be free once it is fully released.

Intype might be worth a look for users who use plain text editors for coding purposes. It does not however provide access to powerful new features or commands that other text editors like Notepad++ do not offer.

When you normally copy paste contents into Microsoft Excel they will all be stored in the same cell in the Excel application. That is usually not the desired way of presenting the information. It is possible to copy and paste the contents into other cells or prepare the text in the text editor in a way that the contents are automatically copied into separate cells.

Pasting text into different Excel cells can be done by making use of the TAB key in the text editor. Pressing Tab represents a new cell in Excel when pasting the contents into Microsoft Excel. To create a four column layout in Excel one would simply write down the name of the first column, press tab, write down the name of the second column, press tab and so on.

The same holds true for additional rows. Just make sure to press tab only once even if the contents do not match in the text editor they will in Microsoft Excel. So even if the columns in the text editor will not look even they will be perfectly fine in Microsoft Excel.

Ribbon seems the way to go and Microsoft already made several announcements about their upcoming operating system Windows 7 and the use of Ribbons in default applications like MS Paint and Wordpad.

But Microsoft is not the only company that is trying to push the new interface. A user on the Deviant Art website saw the screenshot of Windows 7 Wordpad with the Ribbon interface and decided to code that for Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Solo-Dev pushed out an release candidate that is currently supporting plain text documents: A Notepad replacement so to speak with plans to integrate rich text and doc applications so that it will become a Wordpad replacement instead.

The downside of the project is that it requires the Windows .net Framework 3.5. It also uses lots of resources currently but the software developer promised to optimize the code and application so that the computer memory consumption would become less.

The interesting questions leading from this is: Have you worked with Microsoft Office 2007 yet? Do you like the Ribbon interface? Let me know.

Disabling sessions from Notepad++ should not have any impact on other software features like the tabbed interface. The option to disable sessions in Notepad++ can be found in the options of the software program.

A user opening Notepad++ can open the program’s options by selecting Settings from the main menu and Preferences from the submenu. The Preferences window is opening which is displaying several tabs and lots of options.

Locate the Misc tab of the Preferences menu and uncheck the “Remember the current session for next launch” box to disable the session feature in Notepad++.The user will only see the current document the next time Notepad++ is opened. New documents are still added in tabs during a session but once Notepad++ gets closed the information are erased.

Today the first beta version of Notepad++ 5.0 was released to the public on Sourceforge, more than 18 months after the release of Notepad++ 4.0. It offers further performance improvements over previous versions, bookmarked lines, different colored tabs, plugin commands in the context menu and additional options to configure the application.

The announcement lists 18 fixed bugs and features that have been added in Notepad++ 5.0, they are:

• 1. Improve Notepad++ performance – on startup and on exit.
• 2. Add Calltip capacity.
• 3. All the menu commands can be added in context menu, including plugins’ commands, macros and user defined commands.
• 4. Add bookmarked lines operations : delete all marked lines, copy all marked lines into clipboard, cut all marked lines into clipboard, paste from clipboard to replace all marked lines content.
• 5. Fix crash bug : Open files with date pre-1970.
• 6. Fix clone mode bug : now the actions done in one view will be synchronized in the cloned view.
• 7. Add tooltips in document tab to display the full file name path.
• 8. Change hide lines behaviour : Hide lines now saved during switches.
• 9. Change file history list behaviour : Most recent closed file is on the top. Add number on list.
• 10. Caret width and blink rate are customizable.
• 11. Add asterisk in title bar if file is dirty.
• 12. The bookmarks’ look & feel are improved.
• 13. Add “Select all” and “copy” context menu items in Find in files results window.
• 14. Fix goto line with command line bug.
• 15. Improve smart highlight / mark all / incremental search highlight all visibility
• 16. Tabbar’s coulours is configurable via Stylers Configurator(Active tab Text, Inactive tab text, Inactive tab background, Active tab focused indicator and Active tab unfocused indicator).
• 17. Add the smart highlight file size limit – 1.5 MB in order to improve the performance.
• 18. Add exception handling (dumping filedata)

The complete announcement can be read in the Notepad++ forum and the new version can be downloaded directly from Sourceforge.

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.

Akelpad is lightweight. That is the first thing that I can tell you about it. It uses roughly 3 Megabytes of Ram with one text document open and all available plugins loaded. Yes that’s right, you can enhance the software with plugins to add functionality to it. Akelpad itself has a size of 186 Kilobyte and has several comfort features that are unknown to Notepad.

This includes the ability to load text documents that are larger than 64 Kilobytes, document previews before opening them, editing of read only files and more. Plugins add a number of additional features to Akelpad like syntax highlighting, auto completion, sessions, macros and scripts and auto saving.

Akelpad supports unicode codepages and unicode strings, text previews, printing of documents and previews, plugin support and text replacement options. Plugins are listed on the developer website. They can be used to increase the functionality of the core program, for instance by adding coding related functionality like syntax highlighting or a better file explorer.

You might be asking about the differences to other Notepad replacements such as Notepad++ and I can only say that Akelpad uses less resources to display the same text document but does not offer all of the functions that Notepad++ offers. It’s worth a try if you ask me and definitely an option if you are looking for a Notepad replacement and have not made a decision yet.

Update: Akelpad is still available. There are however other alternatives that may be better suited for text editing needs. Alternatives include the very popular Notepad++ or Quotepad

Notepad++ can basically be used as a replacement for the standard Windows text editor Notepad, that’s good for editing and writing basic texts, but not so good anymore when it comes to larger texts or code. Notepad++ has been designed for web developers and software developers, as well as other users who need a fast loading text editor with advanced capabilities.

Besides syntax highlighting, which is one of the core features of Notepad++, users can make use of macros, a plugin system, command line options or session management, all of which is not available in the standard text editor Notepad.

Best of all, Notepad++ does not sacrifice speed to offer the features. You will notice no speed difference between the text editor and the default Windows editor.

Lets talk for a second about session management. Unlike Notepad, which forgets what has been opened once you close the program, Notepad++ remembers sessions and you can continue working on the text files that have been open in previous sessions. If you do not like that particular feature, you can disable it easily on the extensive program options.

Plugins need to be mentioned briefly as well. They extend the functionality of the text editor. A list of plugins is accessible here at Sourceforge. Among them plugins to automatically save texts, a ColdFusion plugin, Color Picker, Comparison plugin or a plugin to minimize JavaScript.

Notepad++ is an excellent program for Windows users who want better functionality than what the standard text editor Notepad has to offer.