For an extensive listing of Notepad++ plugins and what they do, be sure to check out the “ Directory of Notepad++ Plugins” at. Once the Plugin Manager is open, click the Settings button and select the option to Show Unstable Plugins. You can be adventurous, however, and see ALL the plugins, too. When you choose Plugin Manager from the Plugins menu, the Plugins Manager displays the stable plugins by default. The screen shot shows just a sampling of the available plugins. There are plugins to automatically save texts (AutoSave), a ColdFusion plugin (ColdFusion Lexer), a Comparison plugin, and a plugin to customize your toolbar (Customize Toolbar). They expand the basic functionality, which is great right out of the box, to an almost crazy extent.

Notepad++ has a large number of plugins available This displays the same document in both windows for comparison. After the restart, I opened a document, went to the View menu, then selected Move/Clone Current Document, and then clicked Clone to Other View.

Of course, I follow the best practice of saving all work before doing an install, which is helpful, because Notepad++ prompted me to restart the application after installing the Dual Mode plugin. But as an open source tool, Notepad ++ has benefited from the fact that lots of people have been creating cool plugins for some time. I ran into trouble with Dual Mode (also called Compare Mode) because my version of Notepad++ did not have the compare function built in.

You can do this in Microsoft Word, but it’s kind of clumsy. You need to compare the differences side by side.

Think about all the times when you have a newer version of an older file and need to see if you can safely ditch the old one. Notepad++ does document comparisons: You can see two documents at the same time, and have the differences highlighted. The first item in its favor: Notepad++ is open source, so if you’re working directly with HTML or CSS, Notepad++ can do lots of things fancy HTML editors can do, and it is free to download. I needed to decide if it is a worthy successor to Notepad, an application I use every day, all the time. I found there already is a NotePad+, which is, courtesy of Wikipedia, a “text editor for Windows operating systems and is intended as a replacement for the Notepad editor installed by default on Windows.” First question answered. Why “++” ? Why not just one “+”? Technical Communicators tend to be an inquisitive lot, and I’m no exception. The first thing that grabbed my attention when searching on Notepad++, was the two plus signs.

Notepad++ compare documents