What Is Notepad++? It Still Beats IntelliJ and Vim

Notepad++ is the free editor a lot of Windows users reach for once plain Notepad stops being enough. It adds tabbed editing, syntax highlighting, code folding and a plugin system.

Don Ho put it on SourceForge in November 2003 under the GNU General Public License. Developers, web designers and IT administrators now open it for scripts, config files and logs.

The editor’s update process got hijacked in 2025. The project’s own news post of 2 February 2026 dates the start to June 2025 and puts the breach at the former hosting provider, not in the editor’s code. Versions 8.8.9 and 8.9.2 added signature checks to the updater, so install the current release and skip any old copy lying around.

What Is Notepad++?

It replaces the built-in Microsoft Notepad with tabbed editing, syntax highlighting and a plugin system. The project calls itself a source code editor and Notepad replacement, and in practice people throw scripts, config files, logs and markup at it.

It runs on Windows only, with x86, x64 and ARM64 builds. It costs nothing and the source is open. Typical files are .txt, .log, .json, .xml, .html, .py, .js and .bat, though any plain text works.

It isn’t an IDE. There’s no built-in compiler or debugger, and that’s the point where you should start looking at something else.

Who Develops Notepad++ and Under What Licence?

Don Ho, a software engineer based in France, created Notepad++ and still leads its development.

He started in September 2003 because JEXT, a Java-based text editor, was too slow at his company. His fix was a C++ replacement built on top of Scintilla (Wikipedia). The project’s 20th-anniversary news post dates the first SourceForge release (v1.0) to 23 November 2003, while Wikipedia’s text gives 25 November and its infobox 24 November. Pick whichever you trust.

The project has lived in three places over the years.

SourceForge download statistics passed 28 million during the first hosting period, as summarized by Wikipedia.

The licence is the GNU General Public License. The 2003 release carried GPL 2.0 or later, and the project moved to GPL 3.0 or later in 2021 (Wikipedia).

No fee and no seat count. Anyone can read, modify and redistribute the source, but redistributed changes stay under the GPL.

The Notepad++ 20th-anniversary post counts 238 official releases from v1.0 to version 8.6 in November 2023, excluding releases withdrawn over critical bugs. As of 5 November 2026, the official downloads page lists 8.9.8.1, released on 24 September 2026, as the current version.

What Can Notepad++ Do?

One light window holds tabbed editing of many files, syntax-aware display, regular expression search across folders and recorded macros.

Editing

Every document gets its own tab, and a tab can be moved or cloned into a second view for side-by-side work. Highlighting and folding follow the language of the file. Auto-completion handles words and function names, a function list and a document map help you jump around long files, and column mode plus multi-editing change several lines at once.

Multi-editing replaces a lot of throwaway scripts. Place carets on a dozen lines, type once, and every line changes. I reach for it more than I expected to.

Search and replace

Find in Files searches a whole folder tree, which makes it a fast way to trace one setting through a project. You can filter by file type and include subfolders if you want.

Find, Replace and Find in Files all take Perl-compatible regular expressions. Bookmarks tag matching lines, and after that you can cut, copy or delete only those lines.

Sessions and macros

Macros record a sequence of editing commands and replay it as often as needed, including repeatedly down an entire file.

The session snapshot and periodic backup reopen the same tabs after a crash or restart, unsaved ones included.

Which Programming Languages and Encodings Does Notepad++ Support?

Around 90 programming languages get highlighting and folding, plus auto-completion. On the encoding side the editor reads UTF-8 and UTF-16, along with a long list of legacy character sets.

Programming languages

Counts vary by source. The official user manual lists around 90 languages, Computer Hope says over 70, and Wikipedia’s list is frozen at 78 syntaxes as of version 7.6.3.

The manual is the project’s own list, so its number wins. Third-party pages lag behind it.

Built-in coverage includes C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Python, HTML, CSS, XML, Ruby and Pascal. If your language isn’t on the list, build a user-defined language by setting keywords, comment markers and folding rules, then add an API file for auto-completion.

Encodings

When a file opens, Notepad++ works out the encoding in a fixed order, per the user manual:

1. A byte order mark in a UTF-16 or UTF-8 file decides the encoding
2. An XML or HTML file that declares its encoding in the prolog or declaration gets that encoding
3. With Autodetect character encoding on, byte patterns are matched against known character sets
4. Pure ASCII opens as ANSI or UTF-8, depending on the Apply to opened ANSI files setting
5. If every non-ASCII byte follows UTF-8 rules, the file opens as UTF-8
6. Whatever is left falls back to the system locale, or ANSI

Version 8.8.8 disabled the ANSI entries in the Encoding menu when the Windows setting Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support is on.

The plain entries above the separator line in the Encoding menu only change how the bytes are read. Convert to rewrites them. Mixing the two up is how a clean file ends up showing garbled accented letters.

Line endings

Windows files end lines with CR LF, Unix files with LF, and classic Mac files with CR. The status bar shows the current format, and the EOL Conversion command switches a file between them.

Large files

Notepad++ 8.3, released on 3 February 2022, removed the 2 GB open restriction for the 64-bit build. The change was tested in the 8.2.2 release candidate on the Notepad++ community forum, and 8.2.2 never shipped as a final release.

Testers in that thread flagged files with no line endings as a problem. They also said auto-completion should be switched off when writing to a very large file.

For a read-only multi-gigabyte log, a dedicated log viewer is the better pick.

How Do Plugins and Themes Extend Notepad++?

Plugins arrive as DLL files, and Plugins Admin installs them from an official list. Appearance is handled separately, through the Style Configurator and the Dark Mode setting.

Installing plugins with Plugins Admin

Plugins Admin installs, updates and removes plugins from the Plugins List. That list is a signed binary built from the nppPluginList repository on GitHub, and 32-bit, 64-bit and ARM64 builds each have their own. A manual install goes into a subfolder of the plugins directory, named after the plugin DLL.

The window shows the Plugin List version since version 8.4.6, per the user manual. Writing into the Program Files folder can require running Notepad++ as administrator.

The catch is that a plugin the list doesn’t offer for your build may still have a compatible release on its own site, one that hasn’t reached Plugins Admin yet.

Plugins worth knowing

NppExec runs scripts and console commands from inside the editor. NppFTP edits files on a remote server over FTP or SFTP.

Compare shows how tightly plugins track the editor. Release 2.0.2 targets Notepad++ 8.2.2 and above, which in practice means 8.3 and later because 8.2.2 never shipped as a final release. Builds below that need 2.0.1 (Compare plugin release notes on GitHub).

Themes, dark mode and shortcuts

The Style Configurator sets font style and color per element and per language. Dark Mode lives in Preferences, and the Shortcut Mapper rebinds any menu command.

What Is Notepad++ Built On, and Where Does It Run?

The editor is written in C++ against the Win32 API, with Scintilla doing the editing and Lexilla supplying the lexers. That’s the reason it runs natively only on Windows.

Components

Win32 calls handle the interface. Scintilla draws text, folds code and manages multiple selections, while Lexilla colors and folds each language.

The project’s own description has long called for a slim, efficient binary with a fully customizable interface. Version 8.9.8 updated both libraries, to Scintilla 5.6.6 and Lexilla 5.5.3 (Notepad++ release notes, 2026).

Forum regulars call Scintilla the heart of the editor, and there is no way to switch it off.

Supported systems

The downloads page puts x86, x64 and ARM64 side by side. The x86 build covers 32-bit Windows (the 8.8.9 notes still carry a Windows 7 font scaling fix). Most PCs should take x64. ARM64 is a native build for Windows on ARM devices.

The project ships nothing for Linux or macOS. Forum maintainers point users to Wine, a translation layer, and say that when it misbehaves on a given Mac, the fault sits with Wine.

An independent native macOS port by developer Andrey Letov, started in March 2026, first appeared in April under the Notepad++ name. Don Ho called it unauthorized and unaffiliated, and in May 2026 the port was renamed Nextpad++ after the trademark dispute (MacRumors). It is a separate project built on the Notepad++ source, so check who published any Mac app that uses the Notepad++ name before installing it.

Notepad++ or Windows Notepad: Which One Fits?

Windows Notepad does fine for quick notes and short plain text edits. Logs, structured text and code that need highlighting, regex search or plugins belong in Notepad++.

Microsoft keeps closing the gap from the other side. Tabs arrived in 2023, first for Windows Insiders in January and for all Windows 11 users later that year (Windows Insider Blog). Markdown formatting reached Insiders in May 2025 (Windows Insider Blog), and tables followed in November 2025 in Notepad version 11.2510.6.0 (Windows Insider Blog).

The AI writing tools need a Microsoft account sign-in, and they can be switched off in Notepad’s settings (Business Standard, January 2026). In April 2026 Microsoft began dropping the Copilot branding in Insider builds and renamed the menu “Writing tools” (Windows Central). Tabs cannot be fully disabled; the Opening files setting only chooses between a new tab and a new window.

Older guides describe ANSI as Notepad’s default encoding, but since Windows 10 version 1903 Notepad saves new files as UTF-8 without a byte order mark (Microsoft Tech Community).

The default can still differ by Notepad version, so read the encoding in your own status bar before trusting either claim.

Stay in Notepad if the file is a short note and you don’t want to install anything. If Markdown formatting is the only extra you need, it covers that too.

Move to Notepad++ when a log or config file needs regex search, or when you edit code and want highlighting and folding. A plugin such as Compare or XML Tools can save a manual step. And if you’d rather have an editor with no cloud or sign-in features, that alone is a fair reason to switch.

Feature growth cuts both ways. In February 2026 Microsoft patched a remote code execution flaw (CVE-2026-20841) in Notepad’s Markdown link handling (BleepingComputer).

When Is Another Editor the Better Choice?

Look elsewhere when you need a debugger or an integrated terminal, or when the same editor has to run on Windows, macOS and Linux.

Size is where Notepad++ wins outright. FileHorse lists the 64-bit installer at about 6.5 MB for version 8.9 (Neowin’s pages still show about 4 MB), while Microsoft’s documentation puts Visual Studio Code under 200 MB to download and under 500 MB on disk.

A lone Windows admin editing config files is better off with Notepad++ than with the heavier options. A team spread across macOS, Linux and Windows should look at Visual Studio Code or Sublime Text. Project-scale work with debugging, Git and a terminal points to Visual Studio Code.

Cost matters for teams. Sublime HQ sells business licences at $65 per seat per year for the first 10 seats, while personal licences cost $99 as a one-off purchase with 3 years of updates.

UltraEdit includes the UltraCompare file-compare tool and a built-in FTP client in its paid licence. Vim is free, and its licence text asks users to donate to help children in Uganda, with donations now going through the charity Kuwasha (Vim and Neovim documentation).

How Do You Download and Update Notepad++ Safely?

Download only from notepad-plus-plus.org or the GitHub releases page it links. Verify the file with its GPG signature or SHA-256 checksum, and run the current version, 8.9.8.1 (released 24 September 2026), because the updater itself was hijacked in 2025.

What happened in the 2025 update hijack

Attackers compromised the shared hosting server of Notepad++’s former provider and redirected update traffic from selected users to malicious update manifests. The compromise sat at the hosting level, not in Notepad++ code (Notepad++ news post, 2 February 2026).

The sources disagree on when it ended. The hosting provider says the server was compromised until 2 September 2025, and that attackers kept internal service credentials until 2 December 2025. A security expert says the attack ceased on 10 November 2025. Notepad++ itself estimates June through 2 December 2025, which covers both accounts.

The incident response team spent a week on roughly 400 GB of server logs and found no concrete indicators of compromise. Rapid7 and Kaspersky later published the technical analysis and indicators that Notepad++ could not supply.

Key figures from the incident

The attack began in June 2025, and attacker access ended on 2 December 2025 according to the hosting provider’s statement. The response team reviewed about 400 GB of logs over one week. Fixes shipped as 8.8.9 on 9 December 2025 and 8.9.2 on 16 February 2026, and the flaw is tracked as CVE-2025-15556, CVSS 7.7 (CVE record).

What changed in the updater

Version 8.8.9 made the updater, WinGUp, verify both the certificate and the signature of every downloaded installer.

Version 8.9.2 went a step further. It checks the signed XML (XMLDSig) that the update server returns, and it removes unsecured options from WinGUp.

Old advice to install 8.9.1 manually is outdated. A fresh install of the current version carries both fixes.

Why patching matters beyond one incident

Version 8.9.8 lists 14 vulnerability-fix entries, and 8.9.8.1 adds 5 more (Notepad++ release notes, 2026). Treat each update as a security patch, not a feature drop.

Which package to choose

Steps for a safe install

1. Open notepad-plus-plus.org/downloads and pick the current version shown in the page header
2. Choose the build: x64 for most PCs, x86 for 32-bit Windows, ARM64 for Windows on ARM
3. Choose installer, MSI or portable from the table above
4. Verify the file: import the GPG public key and check the .sig, or compare the SHA-256 digest from the signed checksums file
5. Run the installer, then update later from the download page or the updater

GPG signing has covered every release since 7.6.5 in April 2019 (BleepingComputer). The download page also links a community thread for reporting malicious ads, so skip sponsored search results.

Notepad++ FAQ

What does the “++” in Notepad++ mean?

It borrows the increment operator from C, which C++, Java and JavaScript also use, so the name reads as an upgraded Notepad.

People also shorten the editor to NPP.

How do I make Notepad++ the default app for .txt files?

Open Settings, Preferences, File Association and assign the extension to Notepad++. The Windows Open With menu does the same job per file type.

The user manual recommends both routes over registry edits.

How do I open a file in Notepad++ from File Explorer?

Right-click the file and choose Edit with Notepad++. The installer normally adds this entry to the context menu.

For a one-time open, the Windows Open With menu works too.

Why does Notepad++ reopen on its own after I sign back in to Windows?

Notepad++ counts as a restartable app, so the Windows Restart Apps setting reloads it right where you left off.

To stop that, place an empty file named noRestartAutomatically.xml in the %APPDATA%\Notepad++ folder of an installed copy.

Can Notepad++ replace notepad.exe completely?

Yes, through a registry edit, but the user manual treats it as a last resort for programs that hard-code Notepad. On Windows 11, uninstall the Notepad app first.

File association and Edit with Notepad++ cover most cases without touching the registry.

Setting Up Notepad++ in Week One

Notepad++ earns its place on a Windows machine if you set it up in a sensible order.

Install the current version cleanly first, because every later habit inherits the security state of the build underneath it. File association comes next, since it changes the daily workflow. Find in Files with regular expressions goes last, and its payoff only shows up once real logs and config files pass through the editor.

Following this order means accepting a lightweight editor with no debugger, and an update routine you maintain yourself.

As verified on 5 November 2026 against version 8.9.8.1, the advice changes if Windows Notepad adds syntax highlighting and regex search, or if the project ships a native build for macOS or Linux.

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Bogdan Sandu

Bogdan Sandu is a front-end developer at TMS Outsource with 8+ years of experience in web technologies. He writes about developer tools, software platforms, and web workflows based on daily hands-on use.

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