@John-Furby said in Default File Types On Installation:
My question wasn’t so much, “How can I make it default?” but rather why isn’t this an installation option?
It’s called a “design decision”. The designers of every application in existence make them. As a user, you disagree with some and agree with others. If what you like about an application’s design decisions outweigh what you don’t like, then you continue to use the product, otherwise you find something else that’s more to your taste. Since you paid nothing for this software, the only thing you need to lose is your time.
“Why” can actually be a strange question to ask w/r/t design decisions, because sometimes it really was just a preference or even an arbitrary choice by the designer at some moment in time.
But since you asked: my guess as to the “why”: the Settings > Preferences > File Association was the developer’s answer to the request to be able to easily associate file types with Notepad++. Because why stop at just .txt ? or just .txt and .xml? or txt and xml and HTML and c/c++/h and py and … And what about the people who want .txt associated with something else but .npp associated with Notepad++?
In other words: the designer probably felt that the user interface already in the app was better suited to handle all the exceptions that people would want, rather than during the installation process ask for the 217 extensions across the ~90 languages that are known during initial installation, most of which the user wouldn’t care about (when the designer could not know which would be the important extensions to a given user; for some, TXT and XML are the important ones; for others, they never edit those, and only touch C/CPP/H; for others, some other combination – making any choice to favor one set of extensions above another would be bound to annoy a not-insignificant subset of users as much as the current situation annoys you.)
If you want a one-stop location to change the associations, which will ask for the “major” extensions (whatever that means) plus allow you to add your own extensions, the Settings > Preferences > File Association was designed to do exactly that.
I’m a bit surprised it is not highly requested feature.
I’m not. (The following is my interpretation of events as I understand them.)
For years, Windows made it easy for applications to set the default associations. And for years, new applications would hijack filetypes without permission. And even those that did play nice and ask would still mess with things in an annoying way (for example, once you associated .txt and .xml with Notepad++, it would show up as “Notepad++ Text File” for all of them, rather than keeping the individual identities of “Text Document”, “XML Document”, and the like).
As such, MS got a lot of complaints about how annoying that system was, and how hard it was for users to change the defaults if the app didn’t play nice (or if they didn’t remember where each app buried their un-associate ability).
So MS started giving users the “Open With” possibility, to make it easy for the user rather than the application/installer to change the default app for a filetype, and simultaneously made it harder for (non-Microsoft) applications to actually get the default-app status when they asked for it. Many users find this a win, not a loss (except that MS apps don’t follow their own guidelines of not hijacking file types).
Most Notepad++ users only have a few filetypes, so it’s not onerous for them to change their Open With for that handful of filetypes. Especially because, for non-associated file types, **Right Click > Edit With Notepad++ ** still works to open them quickly in Notepad++.
For those who have more filetypes which they’d like to associate, the Settings > Preferences > File Association is usually the next best action.
If that’s not sufficient, the Online User Manual has a section on Notepad Replacement which uses a Registry hack to make it so that any time that Windows tries to run notepad.exe, it really runs notepad++.exe instead).
And for the remaining users who have more than a handful of types, but who do not wish to go so drastic as to try to trick the OS, they generally know how to dig into the registry and change their associations more powerfully than any installer or Open With could.
But I, like you, am just a user of Notepad++, and my opinion only matters as much as yours, not any more and not any less. You can discuss new features here in the Community Forum all you want, but it’s not the official feature request location (see our FAQ), so this discussion will not result in any official decision.