Notepad++  (Notepad Plus Plus) is one of the best text editor available in the market today. It is free, open source and features rich. You can further extend the features by installing the 3rd-party developed plugin. Plugins are actually add-ons to main software which extends and enhance the working of the base software. There are a good number of plugins available like Combine, Compare, NppFTP and many more. You can refer this link for complete list of plugins.

In this article, I am going to show how to install plugin in Notepad++.

How to install plugin in Notepad++

There are two methods available to install a plugin. One is using Notepad++ Plugin Manager and other is Manual Plugin Installation. Both methods are very easy.

Install plugin using Plugin Manager

Notepad++ has a separate menu to manage plugins repository. Plugin manager is a plugin itself. Using this, you can install, update, uninstall plugins. We are going to use Combine and Compare plugin to demonstrate installation.

Navigate to Plugins->Plugin Manager->Show Plugin Manager. You can also use Keyword short cur Alt+p to open the Plugins menu.

It opens a plugin manager. It shows all Available, Updates and installed plugins for your Notepadd++ installation.

• Available – List of all available plugins.
• Update – Plugins for which updates are available.
• Installed – List of all Installed plugins.

In available plugins list tab, search for combine plugin and click install. Plugin manager shows information like Plugin name, Category, Available Version, Stability. When you select the plugin you can see additional information like Author, Source, Homepage, etc

Combine Plugin

This plugin allows you to combine/merge all currently opened files into one file.
Author: Heinz
Homepage: http://www.scout-soft.com/combine.

It downloads the plugin from the respective online repository and installs it.

Post-installation you get the message “Notepad++ needs to be restarted for changes to take effect. Would you like to do this now?” Click on Yes to restart the Notepad++ to see installed plugin under Plugins menu.

This is plugin installation method using Plugin Manager.

Manual Plugin Installation

Sometimes, plugin manager does not work or plugin does not get installed. You need to use Manual Installation method in that case. Let’s see how to use it.

I tried installing compare plugin using plugin manager, but it failed with Installation of Compare Failed message.

Don’t worry. It is an easy method. You just need to copy respective plugin .dll file to the plugins directory. Let’s demonstrate it using Compare Plugin.

There is central plugin directory which maintains the list of all Plugins. These links are not up to date as those are pointing on SourceForge Compare Plugin Repository while some of the latest code is present in GITHUB. So I would suggest better to use description given in plugin manager or just Google it to get the latest code.

You can download compare plugin from this link.

Under releases tab, lastest dll and source code is available. Depending on windows platform download x86 or x64 bit file.

Extract the downloaded folder in C:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++\plugins folder. This is the folder where notepadd++ is installed. Copy extracted ComparePlugin folder and ComparePlugin.dll as shown below.

That’s it and plugin installed successfully.

Open notepad ++ and check installed the plugin. Compare plugin is one of the most useful plugins. In next article, I will share how to use it.

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