Step Up Your Notepad++ Game With Powerful Plug-Ins

You don’t have to go hunting to find plug-ins for the excellent, lightweight text editor Notepad++ — there are a whole bunch already installed, and the others are in one big pack. There are, however, a lot of them. Here are some worth the few extra clicks to check out.

A handy list of 27 plug-ins from the OpenSourceWare blog leans a bit heavy on the coding side of things — which is fine, and makes sense, because Notepad++ is a very handy tool for programmers. Among their picks, though, are some great, general purpose helpers.

• “Compare” is an essential for anyone doing real text editing, as it lets you make changes in a saved copy and see the differences immediately.
• “Explorer” provides a window you can pop open, then use to quickly open any file on your system.
• “Multi-Clipboard” does just what it says — offers a place where you can see multiple copied items, then pick them out for pasting.
• “CharM” pops open a special character map for choosing accents and other items not found directly on the keyboard.
• “TopMost” allows you to keep Notepad++ always on top of other programs.

In addition, we’d recommend “AutoSave” and “SpellChecker”, which do just what they sound like. We’d also recommend reading through OpenSourceWare’s other picks for a look at what else Notepad++ can do. Not seeing all the plug-in options? Grab the full pack here.

27 Notepad++ Plugins, and Which You Really Need [OpenSourceWare]